Jennifer Alarcon is a mother to 10 children and we know that cannot be easy. Forsaking her own desires to give way to what her family wants and needs is something that Jennifer does on an everyday basis.
She and her husband always look for ways to augment their large household’s income but these opportunities are scarce in the remote island of Lahuy, Camarines Sur, where they live. The Alarcon family and other residents of the remote coastal community can go to the Caramoan mainland, which is an hour and a half’s boat ride over slightly rough seas. Working even further in Naga City requires another three hours of land travel through winding roads.
After being a kasambahay or househelp for several years, Jennifer eventually decided to stay in Lahuy Island and focus on taking care of her children. “Life here is very simple and I can say that we are happy. It can get difficult at times, but the island and the sea provide us with vegetables and fish for our daily meals,” she said.
But there is one task that the 45-year-old homemaker used to consider as most challenging of all: Helping her children with schoolwork. Jennifer stopped attending school before finishing sixth grade.
“I have always been embarrassed with the fact that I couldn’t read and write,” she admitted.
It was when her own children reached high school that Jennifer was again faced with a dilemma concerning education: In the hope of helping his parents, one of her sons, Elmer, decided to drop out of school before his senior year.
“He wanted to work and help boost our family’s income,” Jennifer said. However, Elmer’s dreams of uplifting the way of life for his entire family seemed impossible as he realized how better-paying jobs required him to, at least, finish high school.
Elmer pointed out another reason why he dropped out of secondary school: the distance from their no-electricity home in Sitio Lipata to Lahuy Island’s only high school required him to walk an average of five hours every day.
Elmer was then unsure about how things would improve not just for him but also for his family. This situation resulted in a lot of worries for Jennifer.
Fortunately, Alternative Learning System advocates reached out to residents of Lahuy Island. ALS is the Department of Education’s (DepEd) flagship program that offers nonformal education to out-of- school Filipino youth and adults who have failed to complete basic education.
“After a literacy mapping activity in 2016, our team discovered how Sitio Lipata had an alarmingly high number of dropouts, with some quitting school as early as elementary level,” said ALS mobile teacher Windel Alvarez.
The educator teamed up with Yellow Boat of Hope Foundation (Yellow Boat) for ways to transport mobile teachers to the small community, where they patiently taught elementary to high school lessons to adult learners ages 30 to 50 years old.
It has been more than three years since the Alarcon mother-and-son tandem both got into ALS, which the former said revived all her hopes of studying again. After passing the high-school level ALS Accreditation and Equivalency Test (ALS A&E), Elmer is set on enrolling in a city college.
When asked about the course he plans to take, Elmer shared that he is keen on becoming a teacher.
Aside from benefiting from the ALS methodology, learners are expected to gain even more knowledge from mobile technology, innovative 21st-century teaching pedagogy and extensive multimedia resources. This is due to the recent joint donation of Yellow Boat and wireless services provider Smart Communications (Smart) of School-in-a-Bag digital learning kits.
Intended for remote schools and communities with limited electricity and Internet connection, School-in-a-Bag comes in a water-resistant backpack that generally contains a solar panel and battery, teacher’s laptop and tablet, Smart pocket Wi-Fi, projector, DVD player, TV and student tablets.
The latter are pre-installed with educational content that include Learn Smart literacy apps developed in partnership with the DepEd and academic institutions nationwide: the Bahay Kubo Filipino app, Kaalam Cebuano app, Ta’allam and Tahderiyyah Arabic apps, and Matigsalug app for the Matigsalug tribe of Davao and Bukidnon.
Teachers also receive training and program support from Smart and local DepEd officials.
“Since we do not have electricity here in Sitio Lipata, we also received solar panels,” said Windel.
“With these new technologies, I hope students get encouraged to stay in school and finish their studies,” said Elmer. Since the program’s launch in 2016, a total of 112 School-in-a-Bag packages have been donated to various learning institutions nationwide, 83 of which were turned over in 2018.
To date, the program has benefited over 30,000 students and more than a thousand teachers in communities all over the Philippines.
Those interested in School-in-a-Bag may e-mail learnsmart@smart.com.ph.