Monday, 22 December 2008
(PHOTO: The author with indigent honor student Irish Litub.)
CALAPE, BOHOL ---- Bonbon—Catmonan Elementary School in Calape town Bohol is your typical rural elementary school on the outside. A student population made of sons and daughters of farmers and fisherfolks, several old classrooms, a learning institution bereft of books, equipment and educational materials.
Yet inside its walls, a glimmer of hope shines for its more than 400 pupils. Town and village leaders, parents and private organizations have come together to bring out the most out of the situation and has since created inspiring stories of teamwork and triumph over adversity.
The school and its principal Maria Bel Belano has been adopting the child-friendly schools framework of the United Nations Children Fund (Unicef) for three years now, involving stakeholders in the education of the children while pushing the promise of the pupils inside the classroom.
“I haven’t read about the framework but we realized we were already implementing it,” Belano said.
The framework is a set of rights-based, child-friendly educational systems and schools that are characterized as “inclusive, healthy and protective for all children, effective with children, and involved with families and communities—and children.”
Translated in Bonbon-Catmonan, pupils, parents, teachers and community leaders are involved in the school, from village guards making sure the children are in school, to affluent community members helping out in school projects one way or another.
It’s not easy for Calape (population 29,000) as it is one of Bohol’s smallest and poorest towns; and barangays Bonbon and Catmonan are its poorest barangays (combined population is 2,000). Most of the parents are barely getting by with their sustenance and most of the students could not even get a decent meal, much more buy pencils and paper.
But its students are striving hard, including Grade 6 pupil Irish Litub. A daughter of a driver, Irish is underweight and got through her early years in school borrowing pencils and asking for paper.
“My father could not afford to buy paper. When I lost my pencil, we could not buy something new,” Irish said.
But through the help of generous community members, Irish became one of the school’s 20 indigent pupils who received free school supplies from a benefactor. She is also a target of the school’s feeding program aimed at the underweight pupils in the school.
Now Irish is the first honor in her class. Her favorite subject is math and she dreams of being a teacher one day.
“I would like to share my knowledge with others and help students, just like what my teachers are doing for us,” she said.
And Irish is starting with her dreams young. Under the school’s Teach One Each One program, bright students like her help slower classmates, especially in reading.
Her “pupil,” Jane Paulyn Poquita, said Irish helped her read, by making use of the school’s few books in its “library”—basically just a shelf half-filled with donated books.
Parents are deeply involved in school activities, according to the parents’ association president Danilo Camargo.
When the school needed to repair some classrooms, tables and chairs, the parents felled a tree in the backyard and made stools and desks.
The parents are also involved together with community leaders, teachers and pupils in a classroom planning team. They identify problems and propose solutions, which are then collated by the school.
“It is now easy for us to ask for funds from our leaders because we have a plan already,” principal Belano said. One of the biggest projects implemented out of these planning sessions is the weekly feeding program of the school for the more malnourished pupils.
“This really helped in addressing dropouts because parents send their children to school to also get fed,” Belano said.
School alumni who are now working abroad also helped in some projects, while Bonbon and Catmonan each contributed P5,000 a year for the upkeep of the school.
A set of bathrooms was donated by one former student who now works abroad, and is now known in the locality as the Ireland CR, named after the country where the alumnus works.
There is also a standing ordinance in the two villages requiring students to be in school. There are no more nonreaders in Bonbon-Catmonan Elementary School. School achievement tests are back to normal and dropouts are almost nonexistent. Yet there’s still a lot to be done. The school does not have a library and it only has one desktop PC shared by all students.
Visitors, however, could not help but be inspired by the optimism of the community, the students and the teachers.
“We only have one computer, but at least all the students get to use it for a while,” parent Camargo said. “We are hoping for more, but we can make the most of what we have.”
