FOR the third time, Cagayan de Oro bagged the Seal of Good Education Governance, an award given to local government units (LGUs) for their outstanding education governance.
City Mayor Oscar Moreno, along with other city officials, received the award on September 19 at the Washington Sycip National Education Summit at the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC), Pasay City.
Moreno also served as one of the panelists at the National Education Summit where he showed the city's innovations to build more classrooms and address the classroom shortage in the city.
Cagayan de Oro is among the 20 local government units awarded by Synergeia – a coalition of individuals and organizations working closely with local government units.
It started giving the Seal of Good Education Governance last year to promote transparency, accountability, and excellence in the delivery of basic education by local governments.
According to Synergeia, a local government must have reinvented their local school boards, organized functional school governing councils, reduced the number of non-readers and frustrated readers in their locality by at least 20 percent.
Also, the cohort survival rate or the percentage of first graders who went on to sixth grade must be higher than the national average of 80 percent or must have increased by at least two percentage points.
The local government must also have devoted an increasing amount of their budget to education.
Since 2013, the Moreno administration has built 701 classrooms and almost 20 campuses.
The recent school projects include 52 classrooms each for Bulua Elementary School and the City Central School.
To do this, Moreno has expanded the Local School Board composed of members of the academe, interfaith groups, the youth, the business sector, non-teaching force, parents and teachers associations, Department of Education officials, and the City Government's key officials.
The city also has a functioning School Governance Council.