Speaker vows to prioritize bills improving countryside

House Speaker Prospero Nograles vowed to give importance to bills of local applications intended to revitalize the countryside and improve the country’s educational sector, environment, public health and local governance.

Nograles urged all the congressmen to transform the general perception that local bills are just about changing names of schools, highways and hospitals and turn them into something more useful for the countryside.

To show that he is sincere with it, Nograles said that the House of Representatives has been churning out legislations of local applications which are important in revitalizing the countryside and in improving the country’s educational sector and local governance.

According to Nograles, since he assumed the Speakership last February, the House of Representatives has endorsed for Senate action a total of 197 measures of local application, 139 of which seeks to build new national high schools to address the congestion problem in many of the country’s intermediate schools.

The House leader pointed out that local bills often are relegated to obscurity and drowned by more controversial national issues because of the parochial nature of these measures.

But if summed up, every public high school that is being sought to be created in every congressional district would mean huge appropriations to improve the country’s educational system.

The proposed 139 new national high schools nationwide would mean tens of thousands more of our Filipino youth, especially in the countryside or rural and depressed areas, will have access to free secondary education, Nograles said as he noted that the main problem that is confronting the country’s public school system is over-congestion.

Nograles is confident that the Senate will give due course to these local bills.  He added that the 139 bills creating new public high schools is exclusive of the measures that seeks the conversion of a number of existing rural schools into national high schools, agricultural or science high schools.

Apart from education, local bills also touch on issues on environment protection as he noted that the Senate is also in receipt of the proposed “Camotes Islands Natural Resources Management Act” in Cebu and the bills imposing a logging ban in the third district of Negros Occidental and in Southern Leyte.

Of the 197 local bills that were approved by the House in the 1st Regular Session of the 14th Congress, only nine bills are for the renaming of schools and one for the renaming of a public hospital and one of the renaming of a regional police office.  — Fred P. Languido/BRP