Seouls top educator-elect promises free school meals

By Kwon Mee-yoo

Staff reporter

Kwak No-hyun, the first progressive top educator-elect of Seoul, said Sunday that he will enforce all-out free school meals for elementary school students next year.

"I will draw up a budget including the expenditure for free elementary school meals. I will examine the budget and check if the same is possible for middle school students as well," Kwak said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency.

Kwak estimates some 470 billion won would be needed to provide complimentary school meals to elementary and middle school students.

"A substantial amount of the budget is allocated for maintaining and building school facilities. I will slash it by about 10 percent by lowering the construction and operation expenses of these facilities," he said.

The education superintendent-elect objected to the current teacher evaluation system orchestrated by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology.

He admitted that there is a need for the evaluation system, but opposed the way of assessing teachers based on their reputation among fellow teachers and parents.

"Teacher evaluation should be based on students' actual development and feedback, making the program an opportunity for mutual understanding and better communication between teachers and students," Kwak said.

He said of his aims, "I want students to remember me as the one who respected their human rights and made school a place to experience democracy."

However, Kwak's opponents have lashed out at him, noting that arranging tens of billions of won for the eco-friendly free meal program and building more schools to reduce the class size to below 30 are typical pork-barrel pledges.

The ruling Grand National Party (GNP) criticized the free meal plan as "leftist populism," claiming that investing too much in the free meal project would result in the shortage of funds in other parts of education.

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon of the GNP, who won his second term after a neck-and-neck race with Democratic Party's Han Myung-sook, also opposes the all-out free meal plan. Oh supports the idea of expanding free meals for children from low-income families, not all students.

Among the 16 top educator positions across the nation, six were won by progressives in the June 2 local elections.

The superintendent position of Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education, the nation's largest educational administration unit with around 1.86 million students and 80,000 teachers at more than 2,000 schools, was also taken by progressive Kim Sang-gon,

With Seoul and Gyeonggi, two major education offices, being occupied by progressive superintendents, education experts say conflicts within the education ministry are looming large.