AT 3 a.m., 12-year-old Rachel Dellera is already awake, as she prepares for school.
The Grade 6 pupil has to trek for more than an hour to reach the Pining Paglingap Elementary School, a hinterland school in Barangay Butason II, about 12 kilometers away from the poblacion of Tabango in Leyte.
Dellera, the fifth among nine siblings, said she does not want to be late or absent from her class because she wants to fulfill her ambition.
“My father is a farmer while my mother is a plain housewife. I want to be a teacher so I can help them someday,” Dellera said.
Dellera, along with her 166 schoolmates, is thankful that there is an available school next to their mountainous village.
Maristela Delalamon, the outgoing school principal, said that Pining Paglingap Elementary School was established in the 1980s through the efforts of Silvina Laya, the mother of former minister of education Jaime Laya.
The school was previously named Pining Community School. It was changed to Pining Paglingap Elementary School to show special care to their students from the mountainous barangays in Tabango.
According to Delalamon, Mrs. Laya wanted a dormitory to be established in the remote school so that the students from far-flung areas will have a place to stay.
At least 11 schools around the Philippines piloted the project, she said.
However, the dormitory project in Tabango did not last long because most of the parents wanted their children to go home to help with household chores.
The makeshift dormitory at Pining Paglingap Elementary School only lasted for three years due to a strong typhoon.
Amid this, the spirit of caring continues in the school, said the newly appointed school head Carlo Ngoho.
He said they have plenty of interventions to solve the dropout problem in the school, like their daily feeding, adopt-a-student program, tutorial, regular home visitation, and even transportation assistance to their students.
For years, the school has no student dropouts due to the type of attention and care they give to their learners.
Being its former student, Ngoho said that he owed a lot from Pining Paglingap Elementary School.
"Most of our eight teachers here were also its alumni," Ngoho said.
“We make it sure that students will learn by the time they entered their classroom, knowing that they walked for over one hour to arrive here,” the 35-year-old school head added.
“We give them hot and nutritious lunch every day which we made from the harvest in our school garden,” added Ngoho.
The school was awarded outstanding "Gulayan" implementer in 2016 due to its feeding program.
Meanwhile, Ngoho thanked Leyte Schools Division Superintendent Ronelo Al Firmo for his support.
“Just this month, Firmo visited us for two times already. He has this fatherly way of managing schools. He’s very caring to us, too,” Ngoho said. (SunStar Philippines)