Remittances for development

Filipino migrants upgrade cash-strapped Cavite school

by JEREMAIAH M. OPINIANO
OFW Journalism Consortium

NAIC, Cavite -- In one-and-a-half months, the dreams of the principal, 16 teachers and 692 students of a barrio school here to learn basic computer skills in a new school building will come true.

"We will now do away with the typewriter," Timalan Elementary School principal Milagros Legaspi told Filipino-American donors from Virginia, USA after accepting a P400,000 donation for a new school building and two computers.

The computers will benefit not only the students who will get basic computer instruction, but also Legaspi herself who intends to enroll in a tutorial course on computers this summer.

Dr. Elenita Dinglasan, assistant superintendent of the Department of Education's first district of Naic (under the Division of Cavite), slipped in a request to the donors -- a Fil-American non-profit Feed the Hungry (FtH), the Washington-based family charity Roxanne Andrea Mendoza Foundation, and a Filipino-Chinese balikbayan.

"You might be interested in providing our district office with a new computer, since ours is a 1995 model," Dinglasan told the donors.

Dinglasan, Legaspi and members of the Parents-Teachers Association (PTA) of Timalan Elementary in Naic (35 km. southwest of Manila) stood in the summer sun to receive the US-based Filipino donors who came for the ground-breaking ceremony for the school building, which will rise in time for next school year in June.

A lucky school

Timalan Elementary School, Dinglasan said, is "lucky" because it is the first in the district to receive free computers and have a new school building built, outside of the resources of the municipal and provincial governments. Naic district 1 has nine barrio schools and a central school.

The donations from the Filipino immigrants are significant since Timalan Elementary, as well as the eight other schools in the district, receive only P7,500 annually from their local school board (LSB) for maintenance.

"How poor our government is. That amount can be easily exhausted," said Legaspi. She confided that it takes months for a request for money from the office of the governor to be processed. Even travel to the governor's office in Trece Martires is costly, she added.

While the budget under Dr. Dinglasan will double to P15,000 this coming schoolyear, Legaspi said it is the school canteen, which earns P700 a day, that is the major source of resources for the school's upkeep.

Roxanne Andrea Mendoza Foundation

The P400,000 donation for the 45-day construction of the school building was made by the Roxanne Andrea Mendoza Foundation, coursed through FtH. Besides the building, it includes a blackboard, 45 arm chairs, and a teacher's table and chair.

In addition, frequent FtH donor Martin Gaw, the balikbayan from Virginia, pledged a donation of two computers. "It might be possible that down the road, the upcoming classroom will become an information technology laboratory," said Gaw, a Chinese-Filipino, who owns a computer business.

FtH executive director Teresita Calderon-Alarcon said she was able to convince a local contractor to lower the price the construction for the school building, which PTA members will help build.

When completed by late April or early May, the school building will be called the "Roxanne Andrea Mendoza Foundation building". The donor has required that the building have a commemorative marker, and the chairs bear the name of the foundation.

A first for Feed the Hungry

The school building project is a first for FtH, which usually does gift-giving, medical missions, scholarship provision, and livelihood assistance to indigent Filipinos nationwide.

Calderon-Alarcon and her husband Pablito said three schools in Cavite, including Timalan, were targeted for FtH's pilot school building project. The two others are located in the nearby towns Indang and Kawit. Kawit is the hometown of Gaw, who pledged to donate a building at the Binakayan Elementary School there.

According to Pablito Alarcon, the donation to Timalan was "an accident." He explained that he and his wife met Nonoy and Aida Mendoza, the parents of Roxanne who was in her mid 20s when she was killed in Texas.

"We met them in a restaurant in Washington, where we introduced the work of Feed the Hungry. Nagkataon na (By coincidence) they were looking for a way to make a donation, and their preference was the province of Aida's father, which is Cavite."

The school building donations for Indang and Kawit will be facilitated by the government-run Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO), an attached agency of the Department of Foreign Affairs that runs a philanthropy program tapping migrant Filipinos - the Lingkod sa Kapwa Pilipino (LinKaPil, or Link to Philippine Development) program.

Saving a cash-strapped, depleted educational system

For her part, Cavite assistant division superintendent Dr. Yolanda Carpina expressed hope that the donations "will be a continuing program" where migrant Filipinos contribute to resuscitate a cash-strapped and depleted Philippine educational system.

In her 2002 State-of-the-Nation Address (SONA), President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo said the government will construct a school building in every barangay, pledging 1,612 new school buildings to serve all of the country's unserved barangays by 2004.

A SONA monitor report from the Office of the President website (www.gov.ph) showed that 547 school buildings were in various stages of construction as of July 2002 - 280 by the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), 47 by DepEd, and 220 by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Engineering Brigade.

Of these, only 12 school buildings had been completed, 399 were on-going, and 136 were in the pre-construction phase in all regions, except Metro Manila. Some 70 school buildings were allotted for the Southern Tagalog region, where Cavite is located.

The website added that the private sector has committed 450 school buildings, while 285 more would be built through a P100-million allocation from Senate President Franklin Drilon.

Minimal budget for materials, school buildings

The biggest portion of the national budget (28.1 percent in 2000) is allotted for education. But according to former Asian Institute of Management (AIM) professor now DepEd undersecretary Juan Miguel Luz, less than ten percent of the education budget goes to teacher/staff development, procurement of instructional materials, and school innovation projects.

Most of the amount goes to teacher salaries and maintenance and other operating expenses (MOOE), Luz wrote in a report, "An Assessment of PGMA (President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) Administration's Investment in Basic Education" for the Caucus for Development NGO Networks (Code-NGO).

Luz said that in 2000, some 4,231 barangays nationwide have no classrooms, though this figure was down from 6,019 in 1993. The country's incomplete elementary schools - those that offer only grades 1 to 4 - number to 2,569 (down from 6,136 in 1993).

Fragmented school building program

A 2001 World Bank-Manila report on "Filipino Report Card on Pro-Poor Services" observed that government's school building and maintenance program is fragmented since it is carried out by multiple agencies at the national and local levels.

As a result, the WB report said, "schools in difficult locations are often left incomplete."

Luz suggested that one way to deal with this situation without building expensive infrastructure "is to expand the education contracting scheme with more public school children filling empty private school seats."

Luz, who was also managing director of AIM's Ramon del Rosario Sr.-Center for Corporate Responsibility, added that the national government "must allocate more resources for educational investment (e.g. materials, training, school innovation projects) and not just for salaries and maintenance expenses", especially to areas that are targeted for public education, and that serve poorer families.

Filipino migrants as patrons

It is likely that cash-strapped public schools such as Timalan Elementary School will accelerate the tapping of Filipino migrants as patrons of their resources.

In Coming Home: Women, Migration and Reintegration, a book published by the community-based migrant NGOs Atikha, Inc. and BaliKaBayani Foundation in 2002, the Sta. Rosa Elementary School in Alaminos, Laguna successfully tapped its residents who are OFWs in Italy, Spain and the US to finance the needs of the local school, such as a deep well, four television sets, a computer set for the school principal, and a stage for school programs.

Since 1996, Feed the Hungry has also provided books to schools and colleges, local governments, NGOs, foundations and public libraries nationwide and scholarships to 32 poor but deserving students. Nine of these scholars now have college degrees.

CFO's LinKaPil program has raised a total of P1.187 billion pesos from 1990 to 2002 from 1,627 individual and organizational donors for medical missions, education, livelihood, disaster relief, and infrastructure.

For its education thrust, LinKaPil has provided scholarships and educational materials totaling P174,022,319.67 (14.65 percent of the total) raised by Filipino migrants from 1990 to 2002. OFW Journalism Consortium

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