The regional education authority has announced the shortage of more than 30,000 bilingual teachers for Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Xinhua reported that the region is in need of teachers who are proficient in Putonghua and one local dialect or ethnic language.
Over the years, education facilities and infrastructure in the areas were built to meet the growing number of children, but Xinjiang still lacks teachers who can speak both Putonghua and one local ethic minority language.
Xinjiang is home to the Uyghur ethnic minority people and the regional government promotes bilingual education as part of the campaign to spread the use of Putonghua, the official language, and the different minority languages, including Uyghur.
The report said that Xinjiang has 70,000 teachers with bilingual knowledge and skills currently working in the region's bilingual schools and kindergartens. The regional government said that 450,000 children have learned from bilingual classes since 2010.
In the next three years, the government said that they would need more teachers to fill in about 34,5000 vacancies, which would include 3,500 teachers in kindergarten.
Ma Wenhua, deputy head of the Xinjiang Education Department, had previously announced that the regional government had already approved the budget for the program from 2013 to 2018, which amounts to 254 million yuan ($41.48 million), Xinhua reported.
The report added that the said fund was allotted for the language training of ethnic minority teachers who will fill in for the deficiency of bilingual teachers in the autonomous region.
The government is encouraging the program to promote bilingual use among ethnic minority people and help spur economic development in the underdeveloped region.