ARMM purges 39 ‘ghost’ schools in Lanao Sur, Tawi-Tawi

COTABATO CITY — Officials of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) purged yesterday 39 non-existent schools from the list of the region’s academic institutions receiving operating subsidies from the national government.

ARMM Solicitor-General Cynthia Guiani-Sayadi said the "ghost" schools, 34 of them in Lanao del Sur, were supposedly founded years before the 2005 election of Gov. Zaldy Ampatuan.

Guiani-Sayahi, who chaired the committee which probed long-time anomalies in the ARMM’s Department of Education, said five of the schools were listed as operating in Tawi-Tawi, which has several island towns.

Most of the 34 "ghost" schools in Lanao del Sur were named after former leaders of big Maranaw clans.

Guiani-Sayadi said the 39 non-existent schools in the two provinces were merely used as conduits for the release of government funds.

Lawyer Oscar Sampulna, the regional executive secretary, said, "The (Ampatuan) administration just inherited all of these problems in the ARMM-DepEd. These are not very current problems."

Sampulna and Guiani-Sayadi thanked ARMM-DepEd insiders, many of them lowly public school teachers, for their "patriotism" in providing investigators with information on how a "syndicate" had been divesting the government of funds through "ghost" teachers and schools.

"We are fighting a big syndicate in the ARMM-DepEd that has been there even before the 2005 assumption of the Ampatuan administration," Guiani-Sayadi said.

She said they also found out that there were ARMM-DepEd employees receiving separate monthly paychecks for different positions.

She cited as an example the case of a Maranaw employee in Marawi City, who had been receiving separate monthly paychecks, one for a teacher III position, and the other for being an administrative aide.

Worse, according to Guiani-Sayadi, there were also teachers who have been receiving salaries one or two grades higher than what they should actually get corresponding to their teaching positions, as approved by the Civil Service Commission and the Department of Budget and Management.

Guiani-Sayadi’s team also found out that there were teachers who had long died, but were still receiving pay from the government.

"Our efforts of ridding the ARMM-DepEd of corruption have caused inconvenience to teachers (and) delays in their claims for benefits. We need to screen them first if they are legitimate teachers or not. This is just temporary though; we hope the legitimate teachers can bear with us," Guiani-Sayadi said.