CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY – The Red-baiting continues.
Months after a lumad school ran by the Salupungan Ta Tanu Igkanogon in Davao del Norte was ordered shut down by the Department of Education for allegedly serving as a communist front, a local official of Kitaotao, Bukidnon ordered officials of a lumad school in a remote village there to fold up.
Evelyn Cabangal, a math and sciences teacher of the Fr. Fausto Tentorio Memorial School in Barangay White Kulaman in Kitaotao town, said school officials received on Thursday morning a “memorandum order” signed by barangay chair Felipe Cabugnason, directing them to voluntarily shut down the school within two days “or be forcibly closed.”
The school, run by the Mindanao Interfaith Services Foundation, Inc. (MISFI), was named after the Italian Roman Catholic priest, who was gunned down inside his parish compound in Arakan town, North Cotabato in October 2011.
Cabangal said the village chief wants the school shut down for its supposed lack of a permit to operate and for being a “threat’ to the safety” of the community because of its supposed links to the NPA.
Cabangal said Cabugnason also accused them of not paying for the lumber used in the school’s construction.
She said Cabugnason warned that “failure to comply … with the said memorandum order within the time frame given” would lead to the barangay council “together with the people in our barangay” to go to “where the school is located and [to] automatically close the school.”
The memorandum, dated October 1, was addressed to Percinita G. Sanchez, MISFI executive director.
Cabangal said they were surprised with the village chief’s order because Cabugnason was one of the signatories when they applied for DepEd accreditation last year.
Cabangal said the school has completed all the necessary documentation.
She said they began operating following a request from a local farmer’s group, Naghiusang Mag-uuma sa Barangay White Kulaman, to put up a school as the nearest high school is “too far away.”
An hour’s hike from Kitaotao, the MISFI school has 55 grade 7 and grade 8 students, all of whom go to school without having to pay for tuition and other expenses.
The school is also a “boarding high school,” Cabangal said, and the students, along with the school’s three teachers, all live in living quarters within the school complex.
Majority of the students are lumad and children of indigent Bisaya and Ilonggo settlers, Cabangal said.
Barangay White Kulaman was also where, on August 26, about 200 helicopter-borne police and Army troopers arrested 13 persons suspected of being communist rebels or supporters.
All those arrested have since been released after a court dropped the charges of rebellion and illegal possession of firearms against them.
Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI) priest Christopher Ablon, Karapatan Northern Mindanao Region secretary general, decried the village chief’s closure order and said that branding the school as “a school of the NPA” can result in harassment of its teachers and students.
“This is highly susceptible to further violence, harassment, and the violations of human rights,” Ablon, in a text message, said.
“We call on Kitaotao Mayor Lorenzo Gawilan and the Sangguniang Bayan to act on the matter as we fear for the safety of the students and teachers,” Ablon said.
On September 1, three persons were also killed in Lianga in Surigao del Sur when paramilitary forces swooped down on an alternative school, which was earlier tagged as a front of communists.
Cabangal said that already, teachers and students of the school were wary about things that might happen to them, especially so with the continuing military operation in the village.
Capt. Joe Patrick Martinez, spokesperson of the Army’s 4th Infantry Division, confirmed that the military continues to conduct anti-communist operations in the village.
“The village chief of While Kulaman and the mayor of Kitaotao wanted us to continue with the operation. The people themselves did not want us to stop because they fear the NPA,” Martinez said.
Martinez also said the army should not be blamed if students of the lumad school failed to attend their classes.
“The reason was that they too feared the NPA,” he said.
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