044 BALIK ESKWELA NA! (4)
It wasn’t all smooth sailing as one would hope. That of course was to be expected whenever you have such ambitious goals as we had—ensuring that year’s school opening would proceed without a hitch. Or as our boss, Education Secretary Butch Abad, had defined it—making sure that the headlines on June 6, 2005 won’t say “Confusion mars school opening” (All Caps).
With barely a month to go before that fateful day, Abad approved my proposal for Oplan Balik Eskwela. To this day, I can’t be certain if it’s because he had faith in it or he just didn’t have any other choice. The clock was ticking and we had to do something, for sure. But I was confident that the plan was good since it had all bases covered (I did mention Acts of God previously, right?).
We certainly would have preferred if we didn’t have the drama of dealing with some people at the Central Office, who were skeptical about the plan from the very start. What was it they wanted to do? Who are these people running the show? Why them? Why do we have to make all that effort?
In 20/20 hindsight, all that was understandable. They didn’t know who we were, so why entrust the image of the department to us? They weren’t in the room when I presented the plan, so how would they know the nitty gritty details of how and why we’d be doing this or that activity?
Just the same, dealing with dissent was an unnecessary complication to the already difficult task we had on our plate. Thankfully, our new comms team were all committed to the initiative and we had the support of the more open minded people at the Office of the Secretary and the other offices at the Central Office.
At one point, however, I did have to explain to some people why I had to use the entire hall at the ground floor, the Bulwagan ng Karunungan, as our OBE Command Center (my intention was to give the public the impression that this whole undertaking was a big thing). And I also had to justify why we had so many convergence meetings, when we could have just met everyone at the same time (my strategy of having more meetings meant more news coverage for us).
We got complaints about the idea to bring the media to Batasan Hills National High School, since it was notorious for having overcrowded classrooms and may point to the incompetence of the education department (my objective was to show transparency and push for more community involvement in education, and by doing so, I thought it meant the public wouldn’t blame the department).
Abad, of course, knew all this. And we proceeded with our efforts knowing that he was on board.
As we got closer to opening day, we were relieved that we were already ticking off some of the preliminary events we had included in the plan. And we were getting the media mileage we were hoping to get from all our efforts.
True enough, the dreaded act of God came into the picture—the forecast was for heavy rains on school opening day. And yes, we knew that we couldn’t stop that. But as planned, we bombarded the media—and consequently, the general public—with daily up-to-the-minute weather updates courtesy of our weather bureau PAGASA, one of our precious convergence partners. And we made sure to remind parents to bring umbrellas and raincoats on June 5. Forewarned is forearmed.
Our other convergence partners paid extra attention to our concerns, whether it’s the Philippine National Police deploying more cops near schools or the Department of Trade and Industry ensuring prices of school supplies are under their control, or even utility companies Manila Water and Meralco ensuring that the public can rely on their services that week.
As we had requested, these convergence partners had representatives at the command center to ensure a quick response from their respective agencies.
Internally, we had informed field offices that we would not tolerate abuses at the school level. No illegal collections, please. Accept all students, please. And we benefitted from the support of Undersecretary Mon Bacani, the Regional Operations head, who was of course one of the few officials in attendance when we presented the blueprint for Balik Eskwela (the other official present then, Legal Affairs Undersecretary Chito Gascon, was ready to deploy a quick response team to problem schools should the need for such action arise).
So far so good.
(To be continued)