CEBU Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia has asked parents and guardians with students enrolled in public schools across the province of Cebu to support the Provincial Government’s school feeding program.
In a meeting with the 4,500 members and officers of the Parents-Teachers Association (PTA) across 1,494 public schools in the province on Saturday, Nov. 25, 2023, Garcia told them to support the program by preparing and cooking the rice meals from Monday to Friday for the rest of the school year.
This was after Garcia received comments from parents regarding the launching of the Supplemental School Feeding program last Nov. 15, in the comments section of the official social media page of the provincial government.
The parents’ concerns included where to source the ingredients for the rice meal, financial contributions, fuel for the cooking, and who shall do the cooking as some did not want to do the work.
“First, I was just going to see if it had also been launched in other municipalities. Then I looked at the comments. There were people who said, ‘Why are we being asked to contribute? This is an additional expense for us. Why is it not the same as the other school feeding programs where everything is complete.’ This is already complete as all students are fed for the whole school year from Monday to Friday,” Garcia said in Cebuano during the meeting at the IEC Pavilion in Cebu City on Saturday.
However, the governor clarified that the parents were not obligated to financially contribute toward the ingredients for the rice meal. Rather, she wants them to actively participate in the preparation and cooking of these meal provisions as they were feeding their own children.
Spending millions
She also reminded the parents that the national government regularly spends hundreds of millions of pesos in the funding of the Pantawid ng Pamilyang Pilipino Program or 4Ps for poor and marginalized families across the country, one of the conditions of which is to ensure the overall welfare of their children both in health and in education.
Aside from addressing concerns of malnutrition, the program to provide daily meals contributes to the children’s overall health and development. It also promotes camaraderie among communities, as foster parents, teachers, local officials and the private sector collaborate in ensuring that the students will be fed.
In her computation, Garcia said, if the provincial government spends P20 per student for every meal, it will cost more than P3.5 billion for the Province to fund the program, depriving other essential programs of the government of funding.
However, she said this would not be the case as the Province opted to buy sacks of rice in bulk and cheaper price from the National Food Authority depository. The local chief executive of every town and city under the Province then collects these sacks of rice to be distributed to their respective school divisions and then to the public schools.
A kilo of rice could feed 35 students a day, where 534 sacks of rice per day were needed to feed all students, Garcia added.
The program tasks the parents and teachers to prepare and cook the rice meal from Monday to Friday, while other ingredients such as vegetables and meat may be sourced from the schools’ Sugbusog Garden or from the support of the local officials.
Garcia asked the Department of Education in Central Visayas, PTA officials and the parents and guardians to strengthen the Sugbusog Garden program as this was crucial also for the sustainability of the school feeding program.
The school feeding program will continue until Dec. 15, 2023 and resume on the return of classes after the Christmas break on Jan. 4, 2024 to June 2024.
Budget
The Cebu provincial government has allocated an initial budget of P197 million to feed 878,619 public schools students starting from kindergarten to senior high school for the rest of the school year.
The Supplemental School Feeding Program was launched by Cebu Province on Nov. 15, 2023 at the Tabogon Central School in the town of Tabogon in northern Cebu, and simultaneously across other public schools in the province.
It was the first local government unit in the country to launch such a program on a large scale.