Bringing schools closer to children

LETTERS FROM THE AGNO
March L. Fianza

BAGUIO CITY -- Children in the Lucban valley, formerly a predominant Ibaloi community, were more fortunate, because a public elementary school was built within the neighborhood. Imagine their counterparts in the mountain recesses of the Cordillera had to hike kilometers of foot trails just to attend primary school.

Communities where a road passes through would be luckier too, as school children could hitch on motorists who happen to pass by. That happens in the morning when the children go to school and in the afternoon when they go home.

That is a normal scene that unfolds daily, five days a week for ten long months – reason why in the barrios, dropping out from elementary school is inevitable.

In one report by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, elementary dropout rate in the country in 2001 was up to 7.36 in 2006. “Those who repeat a grade is also up, from 1.95 per cent in 2001 to 2.89 per cent in 2006," the PCIJ report said.

I shared that experience of walking for 300 days for four years when I enrolled at the Baguio City High School. The reason for this was that there were only one or two eight-passenger jeepneys or auto-calezas that passed through our route.

At that time, high school annexes were not yet in the minds of the education planners in government so that almost everybody had to walk to school. Well, if your father is a councilor or a big time businessman like some of my classmates were, then you can easily reach school in a car.

Nothing seems to have changed today. If we look beyond Baguio’s boundaries, we still find school children walking to and from school.

Except for the more urban-like settlements or the municipal centers, the case in Benguet and the rest of the Cordillera provinces, and even in many parts of the country, is different.

In a recent press conference by Benguet Congressman Ronald M. Cosalan, he said that this time, part of the priorities of the DPWH in the province will be to construct new school buildings, in addition to their main job of maintaining roads.

Cosalan said education comes as a priority, citing the need to construct more classrooms and assign more teachers in the barrios.

In a story he related to newsmen, Cosalan said that along Kennon road, he often passes by schoolchildren who already have gotten used to hitchhiking just to be able to attend school.

“They hitchhike to school in the morning and hitchhike to go home in the afternoon,” he told newsmen.

This means that the province is in need of additional school buildings which, when constructed, will of course translate to additional teachers.

In 1992, I accompanied then Governor Jimmy Panganiban to the boundary of Mankayan and Bauko, Mountain Province.

While they held their consultation about issues on water distribution, I strayed towards the Am-am Elementary School that was housed in an almost dilapidated three-classroom building that was elevated from the ground.

I approached but heard no sound, so I thought the classrooms were empty. To satisfy curiosity, I knocked. The door opened and there I saw just one teacher looking after three sets of school children of different grade levels that were busy with their written tests.

I noticed that in some schools the walls that separated the classrooms were neatly piled in a corner. The first time I saw this, I thought repairs were on-going.

I found out later that the walls had to be brought down so teacher Maria can easily cross from one room to the next and back. Why? The teacher, a graduate in Bachelor of Science in Elementary Education teaches three grade levels all at the same time.

To address this problem of multi-level teaching in the barrios, Congressman Cosalan said he is looking at 30 additional teachers for Benguet as an initial increase in the province’s teaching force.

“Our concern this time is to bring the schools closer to the school children and see to it that each grade level has its own teacher,” he said. – marchfianza777@yahoo.com