TACLOBAN CITY: Of the nearly 2,000 learners who flocked on Monday to the Northern Tacloban City High School campus for the new school year, someone caught everyone’s attention: 52-year-old grandmother Rowena Taboso.
Taboso, a Grade 12 student enrolled under the Department of Education’s (DepEd) alternative learning system (ALS) program, is twice as old as her teachers and most of her classmates.
‘I am very proud to wear my uniform as a senior high school student. I stopped coming to school 29 years ago and now, I’m back to school to fulfill my dream to become an interior designer,’ she told the Philippine News Agency (PNA).
Taboso has two children and three grandchildren. She married shortly after completing high school in 1993. Her husband, Romulo, works as a butcher at the city government’s slaughterhouse.
It was last year that she decided to enroll in senior high school after all her children earned a college degree.
‘Now that they are college graduates, it’s my turn to study. I am more serious about
my schoolwork now since I am mature. I will enroll in college next year,’ said Taboso, the oldest of the 28 ALS senior high school students enrolled in the campus.
She was one of the honor students in the past school year, with a general average of 94.
One of her classmates is Ma. Irma Trinidad, 26, who came to school a bit late on Monday since she must prioritize the needs of her Grade 4 daughter and a toddler.
In the past three years, she had been attending classes, cuddling and breastfeeding a child inside the classroom.
She quit school after completing elementary in 2011 and worked as a saleslady in Metro Manila and Tacloban City.
Trinidad said on some days, she just stayed home to take care of her blind mother.
Supporting her studies is her husband, who earns PHP400 daily as a vendor.
‘I passed all the assessments and was qualified to enroll in senior high school last year. I decided to return to school since I want to be a teacher someday,’ Trinidad told the PNA.
Being ALS students, Taboso and T
rinidad are required to come to school two or three times a week, and go through modular learning on the other days, according to Ariz Fritz Almaden, the school’s ALS coordinator.
There are 28 senior high school students who signed up for ALS in their campus, one of the pilot schools for the program.
‘The challenge is their age, and some of them completed junior high school before the implementation of the K-12 Basic Education Program. We must unpack their competencies and simplify their lesson for them to be able to catch up,’ Almaden said.
Unpacking a competency means identifying the key skills and knowledge that must be explicitly taught and modeled.
The Northern Tacloban City High School, located in New Kawayan, has about 1,800 enrollees this school year.
The government built the campus to serve families relocated to the northern part of the city after Super Typhoon Yolanda swept their houses in coastal communities in 2013.
Source: Philippines News Agency
