Sunday, May 18, 2008 Fast-tracked kids By Jenara Regis Newman
AND all absolutely for free.
This is what a boy or girl gets when he is accepted either at the Boystown in Minglanilla or the Girlstown in Talisay City of the Sisters of Mary. Here the child is given a fast-tracked quality secondary education with intensive vocational training that makes him or her employable at the end of his or her four years’ stay in the program, three years for secondary education and the last year for post-secondary education.
Behind this laudable enterprise is the Sisters of Mary congregation, which aims to serve “the poorest of the poor” to fulfill the message of their patroness, Our Lady of Banneux, The Virgin of the Poor.
Founded in Busan, South Korea, by Msgr. Aloysius Schwartz, the congregation serves the underprivileged through vocational/regular education of the youth; medical care for the sick and the dying; and shelter services to the homeless and helpless.
In Cebu, the sisters have concentrated on the educational aspect in their Girlstown and Boystown complexes, which serve the Visayas and Mindanao areas. It is subsidized by generous foreign and local donors.
The students in these complexes are accepted on referral by parish priests, bishops, school principals from the Visayas and Mindanao. They must come from families of at least five children with parents of no definite income; have an average grade of 85, if possible, in their sixth grade; and must pass an interview before being admitted to the program.
Once admitted, the complex is both home and school to the child where everything he needs is provided for him: clothing, food, shelter, school, needs, and medical needs.
He can go home only once for about two weeks each year. The nuns pay for his trip home but he must pay for the trip back home, either through his parents’ efforts though the nuns would prefer that the child earns his fare money by using his acquired skill to work at something while on vacation. The parents can visit them only once a year, on the school’s family day.
Girlstown in Talisay originally housed both boys and girls. Started in 1990, the school has since become an all-girls school when Boystown in Minglanilla was established in 1995.
Girlstown is a complex with three seven-story buildings and three workshops with a current population of 3,500.
The vocational courses offered are industrial sewing machine operation, stenotyping, bookkeeping, electronics, culinary arts, and basic computer systems.
The Boystown complex is on 10.5 hectares of land, with two seven-story buildings and three workshops with a population of 2,300. Vocational courses here are electricity and electronics, machine shop and welding, auto mechanics and driving, computer technology, mechanical processes, and industrial sewing machine operation.
Schooling is so intensive that there is no holiday for the children, even if their teachers are elsewhere on holiday or, in the case of Sun.Star Cebu’s visit there, on Technical Education and Skills Development Authority training. Each class, though, has a designated student teacher who can take over when the regular teacher has to be away.
After all, it is not only secondary but also vocational training being given here for three years. The post-secondary education consists of specialized training in the child’s chosen vocational or technical course for six months and the last six months, for on-the-job training.
During this period, the young adult is subsidized fully before he gets his first paycheck and closely monitored. He is still obliged to go back to the complex during his days off.
Usually, when he completes the four-year program, he lands a job except those who are underage, though the school has an endorsement letter from Department of Labor and Employment for graduate minors to work so long as it is not hazardous. Some even get scholarships, supervised by the sisters, to go through college!
Aside from their schoolwork, the children also have time to pray, alone and with the nuns and to play in the complex, since the Boystown has a swimming pool and 34 basketball courts. Sr. Teresita Prudente, head of the community, thinks the place should have 50. They also have monthly outings, like sightseeing and educational trips, as well as swimming weekly at the Minglanilla beach on rotation basis.
It is a joy to have a walk-through Boystown; to see the huge industrial washing machines in the laundry room; to visit the vast kitchen where 12 sacks of rice are used up for meals each day; and to see the dormitory cluster where a certain number of students sleep, eat and bond with one another.
Equally a joy is to see teacher-less students do their mechanical drafting, or use the computer in the big air conditioned computer rooms to learn CADD. And at the back, you see students at the call center lab or at class, sewing school uniforms and other things at the Industrial Sewing Machine Operations room.
Outside the classroom, there is a garden tended by the students, and a lot of fruit and coconut trees from which the nuns get vinegar.
It is truly a beautiful place to study and live in. One would wish all schools were like this and that Our Lady of the Poor would dearly love all of God’s children and not just the poorest of the poor.
With an environment like this, it is no wonder that the Boystown and Girlstown complexes have produced not only able workers for industry’s needs, but also many vocations to help in God’s work, not just for the Sisters of Mary (some of whom are now assigned on Mexico and Brazil) or Brothers of Christ congregations, but also for other religious congregations.
