The Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. (Pagcor) came up with a school building project for the first time to help decongest overcrowded public high school in Lapu-Lapu City.
Last Friday afternoon, Pagcor turned over a five-classroom two-storey building, which costs around P3 million, to Bangkal National High School in a ceremony attended by Lapu-Lapu City Mayor Paz Radaza, Schools Division Supt. Eduardo Ompad and Pagcor’s officer-in-charge Arthur Malatag.
“This has been the dream of Pagcor to donate school building to Lapu-Lapu City. We are very much glad to turn it over to the Department of Education and to the city government of Lapu-Lapu,” said Malatag.
Bangkal National High School has about 60 students in each classroom. “With this new classrooms available including the other three new classrooms funded by the Department of Education (DepEd) Central Office, we will now be reducing to 50 students each classroom,” said school principal Arturo Go.
Go expressed gratitude to Pagcor for their generosity. He also thanked Mayor Radaza and DepEd officials for coordinating with the private sector and other benefactors to make the project possible.
In her speech, Radaza thanked Pagcor on behalf of her constituents for choosing Bangkal National High School as recipient of their “Matuwid na Daan sa Silid-Aralan” project. She said donations like this would help the city and DepEd meet its self-imposed target to reduce the classroom shortage by 50 percent in three years.
In her first term in office, she said, she was able to reduce the number of classroom shortage by 30 percent from over 500 to 362 due to the donations from kind benefactors.
“We continue to call on corporations to allocate funds for their corporate social responsibility projects, such as the construction of classrooms in the city, if we want to sustain the progress and development that Lapu-Lapu is now experiencing. We need to develop our human resource, and the way to do it is to provide quality education to our public school system,” Radaza said.
She said the city expects more than 80,000 jobs available in five to ten years from a handful of mega projects that are now in the pipeline.
Big businesses are coming in and soon they will look for people to work for their companies.
“We need to produce a pool of quality workforce, our public school system must rise up to the challenge. DepEd must work hard to mold our students to be ready to be absorbed in the workplace once they graduate,” Radaza added. /CORRESPONDENT NORMAN V. MENDOZA