How Sec. Briones is responding to Asean landmark declaration for OSYs

As early as May the DepEd transition team of Secretary Luistro and Pres. Duterte’s newly appointed Education Secretary, Lourdes “Liling” Briones has prioritized the out-of-school youth and adults. Secretary Briones observed, “We really need to run after those who have fallen through the cracks, which are in reality huge gaping chasms.” Also in May, the ASEAN Declaration on Strengthening Education for Out-of-School Children and Youth was approved by the ASEAN ministers. The 10 ASEAN countries made up of two clusters, Bangkok Cluster (Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh) and the Jakarta cluster (Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam, East Timor) took the united approach and declared their commitment to address the needs of 3.2 million out-of-school children. This was officially endorsed at the September Summit in Vientiane, Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR). The Declaration is to guide domestic legislation and policies to benefit out-of-school children, including plans to promote “awareness of ASEAN as a caring and sharing community and as a people-centered region.”

Who are out of school?

Secretary Briones expanded the Global UN 2030 Education Agenda which defines “out-of-school children and youth” as those who do not have access to a school, those who have yet to enrol in school despite having one available, those enrolled but are at risk of dropping out, and those who have dropped out. She reiterated the importance of the Alternative Learning System to reach the illiterate adults who have been overlooked: “the estimate right now is for every 100 out-of-school youth from 16 to 26 years old, we have only been able to catch one. How about the taxi drivers? Those adults who have not even reached first grade?” Thus I appointed an Assistant Secretary for the Alternative Learning System lifting it up from the bureau level.”

The 24-hour on-the-go Education Secretary

Invited by the Operation Brotherhood Montessori to be the guest of honor at its 50th Anniversary Open House at its Greenhills headquarters, the new DepEd Secretary Lourdes “Liling” Briones was profuse with apology as she arrived past 8 p.m. before thirty school heads and education deans of Metro Manila, who watched earlier in the day the Lifelong Learning Education for Sustainable Development classroom demo of Preschool, Grade School, and Professional High School students demonstrating Lifelong Learning Education for Sustainable Development. This included the functional Mothercraft Pagsasarili Montessori literacy demo (Grooming and Hygiene, Child Care, Housekeeping, Cooking and Nutrition) by poor mothers and children from West Crame at the giant “bahay kubo” in the courtyard.

Secretary Briones just arrived at 3 a.m. from Davao after attending the two-day Social Development Summit made up of workshops that dealt with various civil society groups. Quite significant and the biggest was the workshop on Karunungan, Kapayapaan at Katarungan (KKK) where she emphasized the need for communal effort to implement the Alternative Learning System in our desire to transform the country.

Upon her arrival, various meetings in Manila came one after the other interspersed with assurances to us to go on with dinner until she finally arrived. With an apologetic smile, she said, “I hope I do not acquire the reputation from O. B. Montessori as the “late Sec. Briones”! I congratulate O.B. Montessori for its laudable work, which made me readily respond to your daughter Sara’s query if I am familiar with Montessori. I’m older than OB Montessori at 75 years old so I know well when it was established as well as its scope. I know that the children are not yaya-dependent – and that’s very important in a developing country.”

The DepEd transition team from Br. Luistro to Sec. Briones

“Since May and June, Brother Luistro and I have been working with the transition team. They have been generous and open about the situation of the Department of Education. The two major concerns are the strengthening of Basic Education reforms, particularly the senior High School program, and the exodus of private school teachers to the public schools due to the sudden increase of public school teachers’ salaries.”

According to Briones, the Duterte administration is strengthening the curricular template to prevent drug addiction among the young. This will start from the fourth grade to high school. Other than using Science and Hekasi, poetry, music, films like the award-winning Cannes film entry “Ma Rosa,” and the TV series “Game of Thrones” can help provide alternative awareness systems.

“President Duterte is supporting us generously but we need your own actual experiences on how Senior High School is working for you. When it was implemented it was all drawing board concepts. We are looking forward to your sharing. You don’t have to give us money because we have P700 billion but we will appreciate more the sharing of your school experiences.”

Sec. Briones went on to say that it was not a happy thing for private school teachers to migrate by the thousand to public schools. “The average starting salaries in small private schools, particularly in small towns, is P13,000-P14,000 while the entry point for public schools is P18,000-19,000 plus P1,000++. This is frightening. Next year we’ll do something about that. I chaired in one of the high-ranking universities – a small institution but with a high quality engineering section. When the state college across the street decided to offer engineering, our faculty including left to join it. So we had to retrain again. Now politicians are stating that we offer free tertiary education as ideal but I have to remind them to think about the entire scheme of education as well as the importance of private institutions, which provide a large part of education that the government cannot fully supply. For sometime there were only 44,000 elementary public schools and only 4,000 public high schools. The existence of private high schools has solved the imbalance.

Only 1.3 percent in DepEd procurement spent

In her speech Sec. Briones stated, “As we realize the magnitude of the backlogs, we have to reorganize the department from the top. I think you are aware that the Department of Education has the largest budget in the Philippine government expenditures. But I suspect we have a problem in terms of ill-budget distribution. In the past administration there was a budget of P443 billion. There was only one undersecretary for administration, and five undersecretaries. I know of other agencies with 40 billion budget having 9 undersecretaries and 15 assistants. Yet, this huge DepEd organization has 763,000 staff, more than 600,000 teachers, the rest is support staff and 24 million children to be responsible for.

“So, I appointed another secretary just for administration because we are such a big organization, and we really need the full attention of one person. Originally, administration and finance were together, but I separated administration. Then for finance, I appointed an undersecretary for financial management and another undersecretary for account keeping and for all the daily reports, etc.

“You will recall that with the previous administration there was the great frustration with the underspending. They played around with the Constitution and I reiterated that it was not a constitutional problem but an efficiency problem. So, I appointed an undersecretary just for budget: budget preparation, budget utilization, and budget accountability to make sure the budget of P570 billion moves up by 2017. I know that this has never been done, but as a former treasurer of the Philippines, I did things which were not done.”

“You have heard all the ‘horror stories’ of all the agencies of the government. They’re all blaming the procurement law. It takes forever and ever for laws to be amended So, I appointed a fulltime assistant undersecretary just for procurement. As of June of 2016 alone, we have only 1.3 level of efficiency on procurement. We have only procured 1.3 percent of what we have projected. It is quite alarming since it’s already been half a year, and many projects have been stalled.

Looking for the lost sheep

Sec. Briones invites all of us to look for the lost sheep. UN 30 Sustainable Education goals extend to the UNESCO-EFA (Education for All). It is a continuous global reminder of “no one left behind,”  the human right to quality education.

According to Sec. Briones, her favorite story is the Parable of the Lost Sheep. “The Good Shepherd who had 100 sheep went out of His way to look for one lost sheep. It was a different journey but He did not give up until the sheep was found.”

Sec. “Liling” is unhappy, “I think we have lost more than one sheep.”