RCM Inks MOU with DepEd

Student support and services contribute to the quality of their learning experience and their academic success. An important role of student services is to prepare students for active participation in society. They foster positive relationships among educators and students, thereby increasing students' attachment to school, and serve as an essential link between students and, their families and school resources and community-based health and social services.

Along with teachers and non-governmental organizations, they contribute to increased learning opportunities and community involvement by organizing or promoting internships, experiential units or short-term experiences, integrated into the curricula.

The Rotary Club of Manila realizes the critical importance of support services to students in an environment where limited government efforts and resources, already hammered by financial challenges and exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, cannot provide optimal positive school experiences to more than 27 million students during this precarious period.

In this regard, Asia’s first Rotary Club has taken the initiative in offering partnership opportunities with the Department of Education in undertaking programs that cover Rotary’s Basic Education, Literacy, Disease Prevention and Treatment, and Peacebuilding and Conflict Prevention Areas of Focus.

Led by President Herminio Hermie Esguerra, together with yours truly, past RCM Director John Cutter, Manila Rotarian Aries Balanay met with Department of Education Undersecretary Gerard L. Chan to discuss key RCM projects:

1. Global Grant Vision Care.

Vision screening for children is a cost-effective way of identifying those with visual impairment, especially amblyopia or lazy eye. Permanent blindness can be avoided if lazy eye is diagnosed and treated before age seven. One out of 20 preschoolers and one out of every four school pupils in the Philippines has an eye problem. For early-age children, the condition often goes unnoticed. This makes vision screening an important tool to prevent and treat visual impairment for this age group. To be subsidized by the Rotary Foundation, this project hopes to provide access to continuous eye care and sight preservation services such as eye examinations, vision screenings and myopia/astigmatism treatment, and follow-up services. Rotarian Aries Balanay has committed to manage this initiative.

2. Oral Health.

Filipino school children suffer from an alarmingly high burden of tooth decay that has been labelled as a “silent public health crisis.” Even though schools have long served as a platform for public health interventions, there is no generally agreed model for oral health promotion and limited evidence is available for realistic approaches in low- and middle-income settings. Under the auspices of Dr. John Cutter —an accomplished dental professional and businessman with over 43 years in private practice, education, and research — RCM offers to implement a cloud-based, mobile, time-shifted, e-dental platform to assess the needs of students and arrange for their oral care.

3. Anti-Bullying Virtual Townhall Meeting.

Bullying in the Philippines is an endemic issue in many schools and over the digital space. To resolve this conflict, RCM has proposed to host a three-day anti-bullying virtual session where various stakeholders will be invited in a symposium to examine the phenomenon of bullying, what its effect will be to the victims and their families, how to prevent and stop it should it happen to them or their loved ones. This is going to be chaired by past RCM Director Issam Eldebs and RCM Rotarian Nagi Zeitouni.

The productive morning meeting concluded with a signing of a Memorandum of Agreement between the Department of Education and the Rotary Club of Manila to undertake programs for RCM’s aforementioned initiatives. As a gesture of goodwill, the Club also donated fifty (50) Android tablets, courtesy of Arik General Merchandising represented by CEO Arvin Arik B. Carranceja and COO Jtee Aquino.

The partnership with the Department of Education manifests Rotary Club of Manila’s continuing goal of strengthening the capacity of communities to support basic education and literacy, reduce gender disparity in education, and increase adult literacy. We take action to empower educators to inspire learning at all ages.