The Local School Board of Pandan Municipality in Antique Province sat down for business to discuss two important agenda items – the education performance of children and the SEF budget.      DepEd District Supervisory and LSB co-chair, Dr. Condez, presented the performance indicators of schools and noted the increasing number of children who are non-readers or frustration readers.  This bothered Acting Mayor Raymund Gumboc and the rest of the LSB.  They decided they had to do something to help children read better.  They knew they could do this through the SEF budget that they were about to deliberate.  Civil society and private sector representatives in the LSB said that it is important to bring back the love for reading among children. 

When it was time to discuss the proposed SEF budget, the Acting Mayor called the members of the Finance Cluster to declare the actual amount of SEF budget for the year and the status of other unexpended SEF budget in previous years.  The Municipal Accountant and the Budget officer attested that the SEF for 2019-2020 of the Municipality of Pandan was P890,000.00.  Deliberation followed and all the cluster heads of schools were asked to present their priorities. 

The LSB agreed to allocate 34% of their P890,000 SEF to finance the reading and numeracy programs of Pandan.    They were happy with the result of their budget deliberation and hoped that this was a good start to show their full commitment to quality education and increasing literacy in their schools. 

Before they concluded their meeting, they did a self-assessment of their performance as a LSB using the assessment tool developed by Synergeia.   One’s performance is measured against a simple list of must-do’s for a reinvented LSB.

From zero when Synergeia first came to visit Pandan in December 2019, Pandan scored 2.9 in a 5-point rating scale after only three months.  There have been ups and downs but definitely, Pandan is on the road to successfully reinventing its LSB.  Not bad, not bad at all!