The health crisis currently wracking the country affects children disproportionately. The totality of the pandemic response has resulted in schools being locked down, students being deprived of critically vital in-person instruction from their teachers. Equally important, albeit infrequently noted, is the fact that the pandemic has also denied our children the opportunity to grow through socialization.
This puts tremendous pressures on our public school system to make up for these deprivations in any way they can. Fortunately, the Brigada Eskwela system is already well-entrenched. In the past, Brigada Eskwela meant that armies of volunteers would descend on public schools and participate in a massive effort to prepare the schools to receive the influx of students at the start of the school year. Brigada Eskwela – pandemic edition – builds on the same idea, but without the need to paint desk-chairs.
Instead, Brigada Eskwela now focuses on raising funds and teaching materials, necessary for chronically under-funded public schools to cope with the demands of modular education.
In response to the call put out by Legarda Elementary School, my initiative Feed/Read/Lead – which had supported a remedial readership program in Legarda immediately prior to the onset of the pandemic – stepped up and immediately donated several boxes of copy paper, needed for the reproduction of learning modules that were to be distributed to Legarda’s thousands of at-home students.
Recognizing that the enormity of the task placed it well beyond FRL’s ability to significantly address, I reached out to the Rotary Club of Manila South, which I had served as President of, in 2019. Its current President, public defender Mario Dionisio Jr., immediately responded to my pleas for assistance. Bringing the RC Manila South together with Integrated Bar of the Philippines, J.B.L. Reyes chapter, Dionisio and myself (acting through FRL) were able to pull together a donation package – both in cash and in-kind – that turned out to be the largest donation to Legarda for this year’s Brigada.