The First Day of School

When I left the US, we only had 4 days of school left and now, in the Philippines, they are just starting school.  The school year in the Philippines runs from June to March, with April and May being the "summer" break.  When we found out that we were going to be here for the opening of the school year, we were surprised to say the least.  All of the TGC fellows are classroom teachers and we could not imagine have international guests in our schools the first week on top of already stressful start to the school year.  Not only were we surprised to be there for the opening of school, we were also surprised by how welcoming everyone was at Boot and how willing they were to answer our many questions and help us during our time at the school.

This year is an exceptionally exciting year for schools in the Philippines because they have moved to a K-12 program from a K-10 program and this year is the first year they will be offering 11th grade nationwide.  The decision to move to a K-12 program was based upon keeping the Filipino worker competitive in the global market considering how many Filipinos work overseas.  With this addition in the Philippines, there are only 2 countries in the world that don't offer a K-12 program-Angola and Djibouti.  This is a huge commitment and investment on the part of the national government with a lot of questions surrounding the potential success of this addition.  Like many new initiatives in the US, some argue that the K-12 program is underfunded given that many of the classrooms needed are not even built yet, as well as the present teacher shortage to staff the new grades.  The Department of Education is providing training in the national curriculum for the new grades, but it was 7 days straight of unpaid training right before school started.

According to the government, there are not enough students to offer grade 11 or 12 at Boot, so the students will have to use the voucher program to attend private school or move to another public school.  This is not fair to the students of Boot that they cannot finish in their home school and will have to travel great distances to get to school.  However, in our conversations with the Supreme Student Government today the students are committed to completing grades 11 and 12, even if they do have to go to a different school.  

We also had a a conversation with a group of teachers and we learned that there are a lot of similarities between the struggles of Boot teachers and American teachers.  Lack of resources is probably the biggest issue facing the teachers at Boot.  Funding is primarily controlled by the national government and it is based on the school enrollment, so the smaller schools like Boot get significantly less funding.  There is only internet access in the principal's office and one projector for the whole school.  Some teachers do have laptops, but only because they bought them.  Teachers are often asked to teach subjects they do not feel qualified to teach and lack the resources to teach.  For example, in the cooking class, students are required to bring in the ingredients of a recipe rather than the ingredients being provided by the school.  Also, teachers are assigned to teach MAPEH (Music, Art, PE, and Health), which would be a challenge for any teacher and yes, they are expected to teach all of those subjects.  Each subject is taught once a week on a rotating basis.  My host teacher Amy had to teach the class and she couldn't even read music notes!    

All Filipino schools participate in Brigada Eskwela at the beginning of the school year.  It is program of school maintenance that everyone, and I mean everyone, participates in to help prepare the school for the upcoming year.  It involves teachers, staff, students, parents, and community members in various projects around the campus from painting to tree planting.  Our visit was even included as a part of the Brigada!  It really helps build a sense of community among the school even if it does involve a lot of paperwork.