Out-of-School Youth Help Prepare Mindanao Schools for New School Year

A moving sight in this year’s Brigada Eskwela (schools maintenance) week from May 24 to 28, 2010, a yearly program of the Philippine Department of Education (DepED) to prepare schools for opening in June, included support from young people who dropped out of school (known as Out-of-School Children and Youth or OSCY) due to poverty, armed conflict, or family problems. These OSCY helped clean up, repaint, and repair schools.

Their commitment and connectedness to community and education is clearly strong.

Twenty-year-old Romelyn Maghanoy, who left second year high school due to her family’s financial constraints, said, “There is this feeling of belongingness and sense of contribution when you volunteer for a cause that is close to your heart.”

Added 16-year-old Randy Regondola, who also dropped out of high school due to financial problems: “Volunteering for Brigada Eskwela gave me and my friends a sense of achievement in encouraging the youth to go back to school. I enjoyed it, despite being scorched by the heat of the sun.” 

Out-of-School Youth in other challenged areas in Mindanao such as in Talipao, Sulu also helped out during Brigada Eskwela week.

Regondola is enrolled in the Accreditation and Equivalency (A&E) program of the EQuALLS2 Project of DepED and USAID. The program equips out-of-school children and youth with education in a non-formal learning environment that matches the unique needs of these young people. 

Maghanoy is working as a sales assistant for a local store, while processing her papers for the A&E test in August this year.

“Hopefully, I will pass the test (to earn a high school diploma), after which I will look for resources so that I can earn a degree in Computer Science,” she says.

EQuALLS2 also offers limited scholarships to increase the employability of Out-of-School Youth and allow them to acquire further formal education and training on demand-driven and needs-based workforce development skills.