Schools that work

Like any other school, ERDA Tech has its share of successful graduates. We teachers feel a distinct pride when our students return to us and share their achievements and success stories, knowing that they come from very poor families. One of our proud alumni is Marlon Rueda.

Marlon brings to life the soap opera characters we watch on TV. He recalls that his family would survive on half a kilo of rice swimming in water so as to become porridge for 10 people. From his youth, he remembers how sad he was when his mother had to sell their television set to sustain the medication of his brother who was suffering from stage-4 cancer. Marlon sneaked out of the house to watch TV from the neighbor’s window, that was occasionally closed whenever the owner was not in the mood for sharing.

Marlon’s family was so poor that his mother could not even send him to public school. As fate would have it, she learned that there was a new NGO school that offered free secondary and technical education.

Marlon eventually found out that his school was different from other public schools. As early as third year high school, he was taking a course in Food Technology and learned how to make and sell polvoron and pastillas, one of the lessons in his class. That early, Marlon was given an opportunity to realize that even at his young age, he could already help his family and support himself in his studies. His most significant year though was his fifth year in high school — ERDA Tech requires an extra year for the students to undergo a year’s worth of in-plant training in a real company.

Marlon knew that he would never be able to study college. Confident of his unique education and training, he applied in an agency that supplied manpower for hotels. He relates that he literally had to beg before the agency finally relented and recommended him to be a kitchen helper at Manila Diamond Hotel.

Today, Marlon is a chef de partie, that is a supervisor for a particular area of food production in the kitchen. He earned this opportunity when he transferred to Magsaysay Maritime Corporation, one of the largest crew providers of maritime industries. This month, he is set to transfer to a hotel in Denmark where he is destined to achieve even greater accomplishments. Marlon has not only been able to lift his family out of poverty, he also visits his alma mater to sponsor the tuition of several students, who like him dream of living the good life.

The title of this article comes from the slogan of the Cristo Rey Schools in the United States. Many school administrators have come to realize that education will only become a ticket out of poverty once the system of learning effectively produces skilled and work-oriented students. In truth, our school is not solely responsible for Marlon’s success. But if there was one thing that changed Marlon’s life, it was ERDA Tech’s dogged determination to expose and prepare students to the alternative option of immediate employment after high school.

It is this aspect that DepEd could hopefully work on as their main rationale in their campaign for a 12-year basic education system. It is not primarily about the extra two years in school. Rather, it is how this new system would effectively help students overcome poverty by giving them employable skills relevant to the country’s job market. If DepEd could make this aspect the rallying point of their K+12 proposal, then it might address the worries of many education stakeholders who mistakenly think that the extra two years is just a stretch of our current ineffective system of education. As in the Cristo Rey slogan, our public schools will finally work, in every sense of the word.

The good news is that the government has been moving with great caution by consulting with various stakeholders so much so that in their projected vision, by the time this new system might become effective, they would have long been out of government service. They might not be able to reap the rewards of this proposal and will have to answer instead the criticisms that will be brought about by the birth pains once implementation begins by 2012. It is a noble risk that the President Noynoy Aquino and Secretary Armin Luistro are willing to take. The least we can do is refrain from our highly emotional, knee-jerk reaction of rejecting whatever is new and remember students like Marlon Rueda who made it big because of a longer but more effective education system that made his dreams possible.