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Author: synergeia

USAID head Gloria Steele leads speakers at 14th National Education Summit

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Gloria Steele at the launch of the Hugpong sa Pagbangon in Iloilo in 2015 (USAID)


The acting administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, Gloria Steele, will be the keynote speaker at this week’s 14th Washington SyCip National Education Summit that will focus on how Filipino students can overcome learning challenges amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

With a 40-year career at USAID, Steele, a Filipino-American, was appointed acting administrator by U.S. President Joe Biden shortly after he took office in January. A staunch education advocate, she launched the Education Governance Effectiveness (EdGE) program in 2013 when she was USAID’s mission director for the Philippines.

Under EdGE, Steele also introduced the Hugpong sa Pagbangon in Iloilo province in 2015, an education recovery assistance for communities affected by Typhoon Haiyan.

USAID implements its EdGE program in partnership with Synergeia Foundation. It is aimed at transforming local communities to be education champions, with the goal of improving the reading skills for at least one million early grade students.

With the theme “Learning from our Best to Defy Gravity”, the virtual summit on March 25-26 will show how the national and local governments can work more efficiently to help students across the country who have fallen behind their international counterparts based on recent global learning competency assessments.

The event will be streamed live on Synergeia’s Facebook page.

Other speakers and guests include Vice President Leni Robredo, Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, Valenzuela Mayor Rex Gatchalian and singer and songwriter Jose Mari Chan.

There will be panel discussions among education stakeholders including mayors, principals, teachers, parents and students on how they have transformed learning in their communities through participatory leadership, devoted parenting and committed teaching.

Education financing, a critical issue as the global health crisis prompted local governments to fund the production of millions of learning modules, will also be in focus.

The other highlight of the summit is the awarding of the Seal of Good Education Governance to cities and municipalities that have shown a marked improvement in education governance. Accomplishing that goal has become harder as the pandemic shut schools, forcing millions of students to learn remotely.

Synergeia, a nonprofit organization that transforms communities to improve the quality of basic education, has handed out 61 Seal of Good Education Governance since 2017, with nine local governments being recipients of the Seal for three years in a row.

Consistent winners include Diffun, Quirino; Solano, Nueva Vizcaya; Lambunao and Mina in Iloilo; Cagayan de Oro City; Valenzuela City; Datu Paglas, Maguindanao; Bongao, Tawi Tawi; and Bacnotan, La Union.

Apart from the Seal, the winning local governments will receive prizes for their communities from PLDT Smart and Seaoil Foundation.

Official media partners for the event are INQUIRER.net, INQPOP!, BusinessWorld, Digital News Exchange, Malaya Business Insight, Pageone, The Philippine Post, The Luzon Daily, The Visayas Journal, The Mindanao Life, Manila Magazine and Woman PH.

Amid pandemic, a library becomes a learning refuge in Lanao del Sur town

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By Manolo Serapio Jr.

A newly built library in the municipality of Taraka in Lanao del Sur province has become the hub of a reading campaign by the local government determined to increase the number of readers among children and expand their vocabulary one word, or two, at a time.

As the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and forced children to learn remotely, Taraka began a remedial reading program in November in the barangays, or villages, to help students. It turned out that some students needed more help, prompting the local school board led by Taraka Mayor Nashiba Sumagayan to act.

For at least twice a week, grade school pupils attend an hour-long storytelling session in the Taraka Library Hub while wearing masks and keeping a safe distance from each other. The students are grouped based on their grade levels and only 20 are allowed at each session.

“We are focusing on slow and non-readers,” says Sumagayan, a former teacher herself. “Our main objective is to increase their reading comprehension, skills and vocabulary.”

It is meant to supplement the learning modules which public school students use to study remotely and to make better use of the children’s time during the pandemic, she says.

The program began this month and children who are unable to join due to the limited space in the library are given a copy of the storytelling sessions on a flash drive. Sumagayan said they plan to bring the reading sessions into the different barangays via a mobile library with books and other materials carried around town by car.

“In a day, if they learn a word or two or more, that’s already a great accomplishment because we can never tell how long this pandemic will be,” says the 46-year old local chief executive.

Seal of Good Education Governance

The Taraka Library Hub is a project of the local school board aimed at improving the reading proficiency of children in the municipality that is part of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

Taraka is among the local government partners of Synergeia Foundation which works to lift the quality of basic education. Synergeia facilitated the partnership of Taraka with the Library Renewal Partnership, a public-private alliance meant to empower communities in the Philippines, helping ship the first batch of book donations from Manila to Taraka.

Education is close to Sumagayan’s heart. She was assistant professor of English at the Mindanao State University for 12 years before embarking on a political career in 2013 when she was elected mayor of Taraka, succeeding her husband.

Even before the pandemic hit, she has been hands-on in enforcing reforms to improve the delivery of education in the town. Part of her pre-pandemic schedule included regular visits to the schools to make sure teachers are around and monitoring the performance of both learners and educators.

Through the years, the number of student readers in Taraka has risen: now six out of 10 have become independent readers from four previously. In 2019, Taraka was among the recipients of the Seal of Good Education Governance awarded by Synergeia and the United States Agency for International Development.

Synergeia and USAID will announce the next winners of the Seal at the virtual 14th Washington SyCip National Education Summit to be streamed live on Synergeia’s Facebook page.

To help educate students outside classrooms, Synergeia has been pushing its local government partners to hold limited in-person learning sessions safely in places where online access is difficult. They are being done in other parts of Lanao del Sur as well as in Maguindanao, Iloilo and La Union provinces.

“We shouldn’t stop learning just because there’s a health crisis. Everyday is a struggle for us, everyday is a journey and we need to continue our journey especially in education,” said Sumagayan.

In COVID-free town, teachers work to lift reading proficiency outside classrooms

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By Manolo Serapio Jr.

A COVID-free town in Maguindanao province has launched a reading program outdoors, hoping to boost the competency of children even as the coronavirus pandemic kept schools across the Philippines closed for more than a year.

Zaddam Alim, head of the Tumbao Central Elementary School in Mangudadatu, came up with the idea after seeing the number of parents picking up learning modules for their children dwindle in January.

“The parents were complaining that their children were not learning anything from the modules,” says Alim’s sister Zarina Mae Alim, a kindergarten teacher. Many parents are unable to take on the teachers’ role at home since they themselves cannot read and write, says Zarina.

That gave birth to the Adopt-A-Purok reading program in the municipality where teachers tutor students from kindergarten to Grade 6 on how to read properly at least twice a week within their purok, or small community area.

The program started in Tumbao Central Elementary School in February and has now expanded to six schools, says Zarina. Up to 100 children from each purok, divided into smaller groups and complying with health protocols, participate in learning words, rhymes, tongue twisters and reading short stories in both English and Filipino, she says.

“This program is meant to motivate the children to learn in the midst of a pandemic,” said Zarina. The 26-year-old teaches phonetics and drawing to the kindergarten children.

Zaddam, the school principal, has challenged all 14 teachers who are part of the program to help increase the number of readers among the children.

Unlike the rest of the country where COVID-19 cases spiked again this month, Mangudadatu has been largely spared from the outbreak, with municipal officials recording only one confirmed case last year, said Zarina.

It takes a village

Since it takes a village to teach a child, barangay officials also help out by providing the learning space and chairs for the children. Barangay councilor Teng Tumindeg built a makeshift stand for the reading materials and some parents also provided some needed materials, said Zarina.

The reading materials are printed using photocopiers provided by the United Nations Children’s Fund, she says.

UNICEF, supported by the Government of Japan, works with Synergeia Foundation in improving the quality of basic education in Mangudadatu and other municipalities in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

Synergeia has been pushing its local government partners to hold limited in-person tutorials safely in their purok and other open areas to help students cope with remote learning. They are being implemented in other parts of Maguindanao as well as in Iloilo, Lanao del Sur and La Union provinces.

The tutorial sessions focused on reading because it’s a weak area for most grade school students in the municipality, says Zarina. But she said the teachers would soon mentor the students on other subject areas.

Through the reading program, the teachers in Mangudadatu are hoping to fill some of the learning gaps that the pandemic may have exacerbated.

Only 10% of Filipino Grade 5 pupils had achieved the reading literacy skills expected at the end of primary school, versus 82% in Vietnam and 58% in Malaysia, according to the 2019 Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics done by UNICEF and the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization.

“During this pandemic, the children are lucky if they have parents or an older sibling who can help them. Otherwise, they’d be left out,” says Zarina. “For a child to learn at this time, a teacher has to be innovative.”

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