043 BALIK ESKWELA NA! (3)
The horrors of school openings in the Philippines were plain to see, yet somehow, no one made an all-out effort to find a solution to them. Well, not until Education Secretary Butch Abad made an issue of it, in April 2005, and I had the audacity to say I’d come up with a magic formula for it and do so in two weeks.
My research got me as far as finding out what these horrors were, at the level of the school—overcrowded schools, illegal collections, resource shortages, enrollment problems—and at the level of the community—traffic, power interruption, water shortage, petty crimes. I also managed to find some attempts at solving these problems, which include, most notably, the Philippine National Police’s effort (if I’m not mistaken, they branded it as Oplan Balik Paaralan).
It was the Department of Education that lacked a response, I thought. And I thought that we should make a big effort—a grand gesture even—and make it known to the public that we were on top of it.
This meant a lot of things—
- a Command Center that overseas all operations established as early as two weeks before the opening of the school year (manned by personnel from various units at the Central Office)
- a hotline that the public can call to share information or make complaints, which will be addressed immediately by the Central Office (which turned out to be especially potent for solving problems of illegal collections, among others)
- a strong partnership with other government agencies—what I termed as “convergence partners”—to allow easy coordination and quick response to issues
- a strong media presence
- a strong push for community participation.
Everyone in the room were well aware of the enormous value of communication in public governance, so it was easy for them to appreciate the many events I lined up to attract media attention.
Aside from a Command Conference with all our convergence partners (which would bring around 10 cabinet ministers to the department’s Central Office), we asked for several Convergence Meetings with individual partners to address specific concerns (think a meeting with police chiefs of all Metro Manila cities to discuss peace and order issues).
I recommended that we make a big push for volunteer participation in Brigada Eskwela to drum up interest—and positive media—for what we were doing as we approach the new school year.
Then on school opening day itself, I suggested that we take the media on a field trip to some of the more notoriously problematic schools since this would show transparency and would be a good way to promote community involvement in solving respource gaps in these schools.
As far as addressing Acts of God goes, as Abad had noted earlier, we obviously couldn’t do anything about the actual natural or supernatural events, I pointed out that we can and should show the public that we’ve done our best to prepare for such events—we can’t be blamed for acts of God, but we certainly can and should be blamed for not preparing for them.
And all this—and many other elements in my proposal—would be under one banner, with everyone in the room agreeing that it be called Oplan Balik Eskwela.
The education secretary gave us the green light. It was now up to us—together with other concerned units in the government’s largest bureaucracy—to make it all happen in a matter of weeks.
So the biggest challenge for our merry band of newly recruited comms unit misfits was to get everyone else in the Central Office on board in something that they’ve never done before.
(To be continued)