Monday, March 26, 2007 Cebu City allocates P800T for students’ summer jobs
THREE hundred urban poor college and high school students will get a chance to earn as much as P240 a day when they start their summer jobs with the Cebu City Government.
Mayor Tomas Osmeña recently approved the employment of the 300 students, who will be working in the different City Hall department offices and councilors’ offices.
The City Government has set aside a budget of P872,250 for the Special Program for the Employment of Students (SPES) this year, but the amount represents only 60 percent of the total amount needed for the salaries.
The other 40 percent will be shouldered by the Department of Labor and Employment (Dole), Councilor Eduardo Rama Jr. said.
A set of criteria was listed by the Department of Manpower Development and Placement (DMDP) for the screening and selection of SPES beneficiaries.
Student applicants have to be Cebu City residents and should be 18 to 24 years old to qualify for a summer job.
Their parents’ annual income should also not exceed P36,000 after tax.
The applicants, who were endorsed by urban poor associations and city councilors, were also required to take and pass a written examination and an interview before they were accepted as beneficiaries.
Recommended
“There were a lot of applicants but we accepted the top 300 who passed both the written exam and the interview. So even if they were endorsed and recommended by a city official but they failed the exam, we didn’t accept them,” Rama told Sun.Star Cebu.
Rama is the chairman of the City Council committee on labor, employment, livelihood, manpower development and placement.
The SPES program was implemented in the 1990s to help the urban poor students earn by working for the City Government.
Although the DMDP assigned 90 students to the mayor’s office, 30 to the vice mayor’s office, and 10 each to the offices of the 18 city councilors, the city officials may distribute them to the different department offices that may need additional manpower this summer, Rama said.
The students will report to work in two batches. The first batch will start from April 10 to May 8 while the second batch will work from May 9 to June 6.
The salaries of the SPES beneficiaries will be charged to the second supplemental budget. (LCR)
