Dedicated headmaster is 'mother' to 70 schoolchildren

The school's dining room is under renovation so Fu Jia and her students huddle around a warm brazier. [Photo by Yan Guanghui for chinadaily.com.cn]

　　Fu Jia is a primary school headmaster and also like a mother to about 70 children.

　　Fu, 24, is the headmaster of a primary school in a mountainous area of Central China's Hunan province. After graduating from university in 2016, she returned home to be a teacher to about 70 students at the Waergang Wanquan Primary School in Niuchehe town, Changde city.

　　At school, Fu teaches classes and takes care of students' daily needs, because most of their parents are away working in cities. More than 30 children live at the school, due to inconvenient accessibility to transportation.

　　Fu and her colleagues used to do all the daily housekeeping chores, such as cooking, growing vegetables, feeding the poultry they raise and washing clothes. But now that work is shared by Communist Party volunteers who frequently come to the school to help them.

　　With the help of local government, the school has been moved to new houses and equipped with multimedia classrooms.

　　Her students like to call her "mother" rather than teacher, and the students' parents hail her as a benefactor.

　　Fu said she keeps doing her job to educate and take care of the students.

　　"I was born here. My dream is to contribute to the development of my hometown," she said.