Cornell student ­Richard Zhao conducts teacher training in Yujiang County of Jiangxi, China, as part of Operation DEEP.

Turning  Krispy Kreme Doughnuts and fried rice into a brand new bricks-and-mortar school for children in rural China is nothing new for Cornell University junior Richard Zhao.

As a high school senior in Illinois, the mechanical engineering major founded an organization called Project Hope Committee of Lake Forest Academy. Through it, he spearheaded a fund-raising effort that resulted in the new school for children in Yujiang, a county in China’s Jiangxi province.

Zhao brought his organization to Cornell, renamed it Operation Developing Elementary Education Possibilities in China, or DEEP, and began fund-raising activities on campus. With those funds, for three weeks in July, Zhao returned to Yujiang with two Cornell students, a Cornell alumnus, and an English-as-a-second-language teacher from Lake Forest Academy. Their goal: to reach 600-plus schoolchildren by teaching their teachers conversational English.

Why China? “Because I’m from there, because I know it well, and I want to do something that will have an actual impact,” said Zhao, who was born in Los Angeles but spent much of his childhood in Shanghai. “We also want to let people in rural areas know the importance of education. Now that we’re in the 21st century, the information age, without an education, you can’t do anything.”

According to DEEP’s web site, http://www.operationdeep.org, more than 40 million primary and junior-high Chinese students live in poverty. Most of them are from less-developed rural areas, such as the neighboring villages of Jindun and Nixia, where the school was built, opening in 2005 and replacing each village’s dilapidated school building.

The doughnut-and-fried-rice effort in Illinois raised $12,000 that, when leveraged with local Chinese government funds, helped build the $50,000 Jin-Ni Lake Forest Academy Hope Elementary School (the name combines Jindun and Nixia with Lake Forest Academy).

This summer’s volunteer team from Cornell helped the school’s teachers, whose lessons are generally limited to written English from outdated British texts, teach students how to speak English. Team members, picked from a Cornell applicant pool of more than 20, were:

Josh Fenn ’07, a biology and society major, participant in Cornell’s Chinese FALCON (Full-year Asian Language Concentration) program, and a DEEP board member who previously taught in Shanghai;

Michael Goulet ’06, a mechanical engineering graduate, who specializes in helping underdeveloped communities find sustainable solutions to local needs; and

Hannah Rogers, a graduate student in science and technology studies who taught in China’s Hubei province before coming to Cornell.

Each received up to $500 for air travel in addition to covered expenses within China. Andrew Fleury, a junior majoring in economics and Asian studies and DEEP’s project director and acting chair while Zhao attends an internship this fall, said the three were selected not only for their experience, but also for their dedication and passion.

The organization’s long-term goal is to build a second school for children in a rural community in China.

—J.R. Clairborne, Cornell News Service