▲ Namyangju City / Mayor Kwanghan Cho

Taking the steering wheel of Namyangju City as the 7th mayor, Kwanghan Cho has worked day and night to improve overall quality of citizen’s lives. He has brought up necessary areas for improvement with particular attention to remodeling the 4 streams of the city and better education for underprivileged children and students. 

[Stream Improvement]

He first rolled up sleeves to improve streams of the city where illegal vendors operated for a long time. From August 2018, he worked on 4 streams including Cheonghag Stream. As a result, 26 illegal vendors were removed alongside 5,625 tons of waste in Cheonghag Stream alone. When it was done, he started creating garden parks for citizens to come and rest and opened Cheonghag Valley Resort on June 1 this year. It was a great success that more than 100,000 people visited the resort within 4 months of its opening and it has become one of the landmarks of the city. Thanks to this great success, the city received the presidential prize at the 17th Korea Local Government Administration Competition.

[Better Education for Underprivileged Children]

As the social distancing has taken place normal in this time of the pandemic, schools are busier than ever turning offline classes to online. However, the turning does not seem to have benefited all of underprivileged children. The city moves fast to bring up data on the needs and wants of practical support and has been supplying smart education tools including laptops since April 2020. The city collected donations from high city officials and various organizations and groups and succeeded securing 1.5 billion won ($1.2 million). Adding 400 million reserved fund to it, the city bought and gave out 2,349 laptops and 503 PCs to 2,852 children in need. As part of this, the city enacted an Ordinance on Education Tools for Underprivileged Children. Since August this year, the city included middle and high school students with 1,890 affected students followed by 290 who were also benefited. The dispatch of the laptops and PCs starts from next month. According to a survey, 99.9% children and students answered that the laptops and PCs they received helped their study and a student gave a touching review “For the first time in my life I have had a laptop” and another student “I now can be able to take part in the class with the laptop. Before then I did it on my phone with my teacher.” Mayor Cho said “Smart educational devices like laptops, tablets and PCs, in fact, must rather be publicly available so that not a single student should be disadvantaged from the class. The city will keep working on this.”

[More Support]

In addition to educational tools, the city collected another round of donations from civil and social organizations and sent desks, chairs, closets, beds and LED stands to 337 households in need in the city. Taking the momentum, the city has been running one on one class for 80 students in need since May this year thanks to its winning the Gyeonggi Province Job Policy Market Contest. The class is arranged once or twice a week for 6 months and 20 education majored instructors have been hired for this support. Mayor Cho said “It is the job of the city to pay attention to children and students in need as well as their families so that they can have equal educational opportunities like many others.” As of 2021, around 2,500 public servants are working for 730,000 citizens in Namyangju. <PowerKorea>

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