ZAMBOANGA CITY, Philippines – More than 1,000 parents who are members of various Parents-Teachers Associations (PTAs) and other concerned groups participated in the training on education improvement planning and implementation conducted by the Department of Education (DepEd) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Education Quality and Access for Learning and Livelihood Skills 2 (EQuALLS2) Communications Director Beng Anago said the participants came from the poorest and most conflict-affected communities in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), and Central and Western Mindanao.

According to Anago, the training is aimed at supporting DepEd’s execution of its school-based management strategy for achieving its “Education For All” goal by year 2015, through empowering schools and communities to identify their own education needs, and plan and implement projects to address them.

The community members were trained to assess their education status, set goals and plans, and organize themselves effectively to achieve the objectives of the program, tap funding and other support sources, and manage their finances, she said.

She also reported that the USAID also gave each community a $1,000 grant with which to implement its planned project as part of the training, which the communities matched mostly with local government funds and their own in-kind resources.

Most of the implemented projects include construction of school facilities, such as toilets, potable water systems, libraries, and laboratories, and provision of books and other learning resources, which are extremely lacking in such areas.

Some communities also launched campaigns to reduce student absenteeism, raise their National Achievement Test scores, and provide more teachers, EQuALLS2 officers said.

Anago also explained that in order to facilitate planning, some communities were trained to use Barangay Education Report Cards, which, like school report cards, track education progress through key community-identified measures such as classroom-to-pupil ratio, pupil-to-textbook ratio, student enrollment and completion rates, and out-of-school youth programs.

Parents were also encouraged to read with their children at home to improve their children’s reading and comprehension skills, she said.

With the end of the project training, a number of municipal governments, particularly in the Zamboanga Peninsula, have passed ordinances institutionalizing yearly community and municipal education planning and allocation of funds for priority PTA projects.

Aside from community training, EQuALLS2 also built and repaired close to 2,000 classrooms, 600 of which were through USAID’s partnership with Petron Foundation, trained more than 3,000 teachers and school administrators, distributed some 2.2 million books, and gave alternative basic education and livelihood skills training to more than 100,000 out-of-school youth.