COTABATO CITY, Philippines – Some 10,800 school children in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) would be regularly taught to develop and practice healthy habit in a program designed to ensure better attendance in public elementary schools, and reduce the nagging illiteracy rate in the region.

The figure is the initial target prescribed in a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) signed recently here by ARMM acting Governor Ansaruddin Alonto Adiong, Regional Education Secretary Bart Caudang, and Alexander Shcratz, a German executive director of the foreign-bankrolled “Fit for Schools.”

The MoA prescribed for the pilot inclusion of the ARMM’s seven school divisions in the nationwide coverage of the Essential Health Care Program (EHCP) for school children.

The EHCP, which the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) and Germany’s Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) funded with P37.5 million, “has been successfully implemented in 23 Philippine provinces, and is now being scaled up to a national program,” Schratz said at the MoA signing rites here recently.

It consists of three interventions – regular hand-washing with soap, tooth brushing with fluoride, and bi-annual de-worming, which are essential practices that would help safeguard school kids from infectious diseases and tooth decay, Schratz said.

This year’s implementation of the EHCP in the ARMM will cover some 10,800 school children from the seven academic divisions in Lanao del Sur and Maguindanao.

More school kids will be covered under the program implementation next academic year, according to the MoA signatories.

In another development, incumbent officials of the ARMM are girding to settle some P400 million worth of accumulated debts from past administrations’ failure to remit on time school teachers’ premiums to the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS), it was revealed Monday.

ARMM Executive Secretary Naguib Sinarimbo said the Office of the Regional Governor is following up vigorously its earlier communications with all institutions including the GSIS with known collectibles from agencies of the regional autonomous government.

“We have earlier asked all concerned entities in formal writing, asking them to update us on the standing payables due them. One of these agencies is the GSIS,” Sinarimbo said.

He said the updating of the outstanding payables they have inherited from past administrations has been ordered by Adiong in his desire to “clear the debts” of the regional government before he bows out of office this coming October 1.

Although the Adiong administration merely inherited a great magnitude of problems including financial debts, it is “very desirous to leave a legacy of good governance for the successors to administer the ARMM system smoothly,” Sinarimbo said.