Butuan Central ES declares victory on SBM Level 3 of Practice
By ROLAN T. PELEGRO
Every educational institution has its own set of issues that must be addressed. Many initiatives and reform efforts have been implemented over the past decades to address these issues. The adoption and implementation of SBM – School-Based Management – is a key response of the Department of Education. SBM was officially implemented as a governance framework of DepEd in the Philippines with the passage of RA 9155 in 2001 as legal cover. SBM is an educational improvement strategy that transfers significant decision-making authority from state and district offices to individual schools and can create more effective learning environments for learners by involving stakeholders in these key decisions.1
Butuan Central Elementary School with the school ID of 132023, SBM is a new approach and many teachers have not been exposed to it. As pandemic struck, the school was subjected to a slew of drastic changes and uncertainties. On Annual Implementation Plan or AIP 2021, “BCES enrolment is decreasing for the last 3 years. The Mean Percentage Score (MPS) of pupils is low with an average rating of 73%. There is also an increase on school’s problems on drainage, garbage disposal, cleanliness, substandard electrical wirings, cases on theft of school properties and shortage of resources due to increase consumption of water and electricity. But, stakeholders’ participation in school programs, assemblies and meetings are evident. Moral, physical and financial support are extended through the annual Tapok-Tapok celebration, General PTA assembly, teachers’ faculty and district meetings, GPTA Board meetings, GPTA hataw fund-raising activity for athletics, private and public sectors donations and support in the Brigada Eskwela and the like.”
So, why assess the School-Based Management (SBM) practices? To assess the level of SBM practices in schools, to provide a foundation for developing a plan of action, to improve SBM support systems through interventions at the school and other administrative levels of Deped, and to assess the effectiveness of SBM practices in the delivery of basic education services.2
The Division SBM Validation took place on August 8, 2021. The SBM validation team reviewed all documents and evidences related to SBM school practices. The validation steps: (1) Determine Performance Improvement of three thematic areas, namely access, efficiency, and quality; (2) Compute for validated SBM assessment scores on four principles, namely leadership, curriculum and learning, continuous improvement, and resource management; and (3) Compute for final rating, which has a weight of 60% for KPI and 40% for DOD. The division validation was a success, with a numerical rating of 2.80 (Advanced).
BCES was then qualified for regional validation. It was scheduled for late September 13, 2021. The same process and tool were used in validating, but with a different set of validating teams from various school divisions. That event was not as easy as expected, with many articulations, judgments of practices, and persuading conversations being thrown by validators, but it all worked well in the end. And just recently, on November 19, 2021, the official result was released: BCES cleared the hurdles and successfully passed SBM Level validation with a rating score of 2.55. ###
[1] Llego 2022. Office of Research Education and Customer Guide [2] Pepito & Acibar, 2019. School-Based Management and Performance of Public Elementary School Heads
