041 BALIK ESKWELA NA! (1)
It was April (2005) and we were in Baguio to accompany then education secretary Butch Abad in several speaking engagements in the city, including one at the Philippine Military Academy (I talked about it previously in Blog 014: Eye Opener). He was also there to speak to various education stakeholders as part of our push for school-based management under his flagship program, what we then called the Schools First Initiative.
With all engagements done, we found the opportunity to corner him—just before he leaves for Manila—to discuss with him in private the communications plan we prepared for him over the last couple of weeks. As he stared at the slides on the wall, he was exceptionally quiet, waiting for the “show” to end before he said a single word—
“This is all good,” he said to his eager audience, his newly assembled communications team.
“But what I’d like to see is what you can do so that the headlines on June 6 won’t say CONFUSION MARS SCHOOL OPENING,” he added, with his patented smile.
He explained that he didn’t want the department to look incompetent with its handling of the opening of the school year, which was scheduled on June 5, barely seven weeks away. And he noted that he had not seen any reason to think that June 5 would come and go without a hitch. To him, this had the potential of a public relations nightmare, and he was right.
After some back and forth, I volunteered to close the discussion by saying that I’d come up with something. Give me two weeks, I remember saying. And that was that.
Abad left. And I had two weeks to come up with a solution to the problem.
Mind you, this was 2005. And as I did my research on what issues were encountered in previous years, I soon enough realized that there’s really a long list of school opening concerns—and I knew that I had to find a formula to solve all of them. In two weeks.
(To be continued)