‘Brigada’ shows no one left behind

Blessie Fabricante, 5 years old, incoming grade 1 student, joins Brigada Eskwela and help clean a classroom in Kamuning Elementary School on Monday, May 30, 2016. INQUIRER PHOTO / GRIG C. MONTEGRANDE

KAYAPA, Nueva Vizcaya – This sleepy mountain town teemed with celebration on Monday as Education Secretary Armin Luistro led the launch of the nationwide Brigada Eskwela here as a way of showing that when it came to education “nobody gets left behind.”

While the thrust of Brigada Eskwela, or National Schools Maintenance Week, is to ensure the country’s public schools will be ready to welcome more than 21 million elementary and high school students on June 13, the launch on Monday also saw the distribution of much-needed resources from the private sector for students living in far-flung and off-grid areas.

Among the items that were turned over to students here were 231 bicycles from San Miguel Foundation Inc., a boat from Samsung Electronics Philippines Corp., more than 1,000 solar lamps from ICAD Foundation and One Meralco Foundation, and schools supplies from National Book Store Foundation Inc.

“That’s why we came to this far-flung municipality, so that we cannot only say in words but also in our hearts that in education nobody gets left behind,” Luistro said during on Monday’s program.

He said that Kayapa, a third-class municipality, also provided the best population of learners in which the DepEd had to put more effort, such as with the indigenous peoples community.

Luistro said that while Brigada Eskwela had been around since 2003, there was still a need to bring it from the National Capital Region to the hard-to-reach areas.

He noted that doing so would allow for “a better feel of what is really happening in the Philippines,” especially in the education sector.

Since 2010, he said, over 40 million volunteers had given their time and effort to the initiative.

He added that since the program started in 2003, some P28.6 billion in non-monetary donations had been given by the private sector to the public schools.

With a month left in office, Luistro said the challenge for the next administration would be the reduction of the number of out-of-school youth (OSY) by further empowering last mile efforts such as the Abot Alam program.

He noted that data showed that in 2008, the number of OSYs stood at 2.9 million. Because of the DepEd’s efforts, he said the number came down to 1.2 million in 2013.