The kids are taking over

Another week, another change at Blue Dragon.

Many of our friends will know our staff member Huong, coordinator of the Stay In School program. This week, Huong finished up with Blue Dragon, to move on to a teaching career in a university.

Stay In School is a fantastically successful program. From next month, there will be 350 children in rural districts supported through the program to (as the name suggests) stay in school. Our success rate is huge - in the past 2 years, only 2 or 3 kids have dropped out of school.

But staff-wise, SIS has not been so successful. Huong was our 4th coordinator in two years!

The problem is that Blue Dragon hires young people - mostly due to budget - and once they are with us, they learn so much that they are quickly snapped up by other organisations.

So I am not hiring another coordinator - four is enough!

I'm handing the job over to the kids.

Here in Hanoi, we work with well over 100 street kids, and a few are perfectly capable of learning the basics of the Stay In School administration.

The kids tend to be here for years, too. Many of the kids in the program have been around longer than any staff member (excluding myself).

We have already started the process of teaming up kids with admin staff to work together on Stay In School. Of course, the kids can't do all of the job themselves...

Not yet, anyway.