When you think of school, you probably think of young students. In Nanjiang county, however, students are both old and young.

They attend training classes to learn practical skills and about government policies pertaining to agriculture.

A mountainous county in Sichuan, Nanjiang was once barely accessible. Since China launched its reform and opening-up policies, remote roads have been upgraded from narrow mountain paths to spacious thoroughfares linking villages.

Many educated young residents have left Nanjiang for better-paying jobs. People who remain in the villages are older and less educated.

To support those left-behind people, the Nanjiang county committee of the Communist Party of China and the county government decided in 2015 to spend more than 2 million yuan ($288,000) each year to train village officials and potential officials at the State-owned Xiaohe Vocational School in the county, said Liu Kai, Party chief of Nanjiang.

Liu had been impressed with a poorly educated old Party chief in Baihu village in Heitan township who resigned because he did not know how to use a computer or the internet.

Despite having the heart to serve, such people did not excel in their jobs, he said.

Training classes have been held at the vocational school, drawing more than 400 village officials and would-be officials such as students, deactivated soldiers and people returning to their home villages to start businesses.

Teachers may be experts invited from the outside or talented local farmers. They teach the trainees government policies and practical skills.

Since the classes started, 36 trainees have been elected village Party chiefs and 28 have been elected village heads to lead poverty alleviation efforts.

After the training, Xu Min, a young college graduate, became an official in Mingyue village in Nanjiang where she set up rural cooperatives to plant fruit trees - plum, apricot and loquat - creating jobs for nearly 100 villagers. More than 50 are from poor families.

Nanjiang has also run evening schools in each village, providing lectures to more than 400,000 villagers.

The lectures teach practical skills, such as how to grow walnuts, honeysuckle and selenium tea and how to protect the environment, said Xing Cai, a tea farmer from Xixiang village, Chixi township.

"Green mountains mean potential economic returns," he said.

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