kaban galing - front cover - galing pook

33 NAGA CITY
Reinventing Public Education
Reinventing the Naga City School Board
THE City of Naga is advancing the role of the local school board as “a
catalyst of reforms that will establish quality education as a universal
right and foundation for economic development and poverty alleviation”.
In spearheading the reinvention of the school board, the local government
has also caused the empowerment of the local community to pursue its
development goals with greater autonomy.
Weak on Software
For more than a decade, Naga City relied on the Department of
Education’s Division of City Schools to take the initiative in defining
education priorities to be funded by the Special Education Fund (SEF)
being collected annually by the city government. This reduced the school
board to a local budgeting body that met early in the year to determine
how the SEF would be spent. Specifically, decision-making had been
confined to an eight-person board where most often “education priorities”
were determined by its two most powerful members, namely, the mayor
and the division superintendent. As a result, SEF utilization largely
reflected the conventional wisdom that investing in physical facilities
was the best that could be done in raising the quality of education.
While Naga City led the ten schools divisions in Bicol in terms of
providing basic school facilities, this did not improve the academic
achievement level of its over 36,000 public school children. This sad
scenario never came out in board meetings nor was it explained to the
public. Meanwhile, the 1,200 public school teachers were unable to
effectively carry out their task because the badly needed “software
infrastructure” (books, reference materials, trainings, etc.), were largely
ignored and remained unaddressed.
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