Education is universally recognized as the great leveler.  Quality education can equalize opportunities, especially for the poor. The public education system, however, was not among the services devolved to LGUs and remains within the control and supervision of the national government, through the Department of Education.  While provision for a Local School Board (LSB) was made under the Local Government Code of 1991, ostensibly to involve local authorities and tap local resources in improving service delivery, the self-limiting functions of an LSB has largely rendered it ineffectual.  This setup has significantly limited the involvement of LGUs in improving the public school system.

The Reinventing the Naga City School Board project focuses on the Naga City School Board, with the end view of making it a vehicle for enhancing local autonomy in the provision of quality public education through administrative and organizational reforms. In the process, the project seeks to imbue the NCSB with the four elements of good governance as described by the Asian Development Bank:

• accountability or the building of government capacity to make public officials answerable to the people

• participation or participatory development process that ensure people’s access to institutions that promote development

• predictability or legal frameworks, which is not only the presence of rules that regulate behavior but also their fair and consistent application, and

• transparency or information openness, the availability of information to the general public. 

Finally, emerging lessons derived from project implementation are also envisioned to lay the basis for policy recommendations on how Philippine LSBs can be strengthened to become a more relevant and responsive institution in local communities. 

The Reinventing the Naga City School Board Project seeks to:

1.  Strengthen the organizational structure of the Naga City School Board (NCSB) to ensure quality multisectoral representation by the community

2.  Develop the capability of the NCSB Secretariat, Technical Staff and other related working units to provide quality staff work to the Board

3.  Institutionalize a transparent, participative education planning and budgeting system that will promote accountability by public officials and greater involvement by the local community

4.  Develop a community-owned local education plan and budget with strong citizen participation

5.  Identify alternative ways of financing the local education plan beyond traditional funding means, especially by mobilizing internal and external sources

6.  Design and institutionalize a transparent financial management and procurement system for the Board

7.  Build up and sustain stakeholdership by effectively communicating the plan and institutionalizing a feedback system for the general public, and

8.  Develop policy recommendations for strengthening Local School Boards in the Philippines as a step in continuing the decentralization process.

Major activities.  Essentially, the project comprises six major activities:

1.  Comparative study.  Involving a six-man study team consisting mostly of current NCSB members, this seeks to give the team firsthand knowledge on how successful U.S. school boards operate; and enable them to appreciate how strong, functional school boards can help improve the quality of education in a locality. In addition, the study tour will provide each team member with fresh ideas on how their own school board can be strengthened.

2.  Organizational development.  This seeks to develop the NCSB organization by crafting a locally relevant Vision-Mission-Goal Statement for the Board; and conducting an organizational diagnostic to determine areas for improvement, especially in terms of representation and manner of selecting representatives.  In addition, it will include organizing and developing capability of an NCSB technical staff; teambuilding activities to foster better relations among NCSB work units, as well as staff development training to develop capability of these work units to provide general staff work. The progressive operation of the Board will be documented systematically to generate an Operations Manual that will guide its day-to-day operations.

3.  Participative education planning and budgeting.  Essentially, this seeks to initiate and institutionalize a process that will actively engage the local community in participative planning and budgeting for the education sector.  Strong community participation is especially required in needs assessment and priority setting; a Stakeholders Congress for plan critiquing and mobilization of alternative funding sources, and NCSB budget presentation through a State of Local Education Report by the Board.

4.  Managing School Board expenditures. This seeks to develop and institutionalize a transparent financial management and procurement system for the Board that will operationalize budget implementation, monitoring and evaluation. It will also provide for a NCSB Match Seed Fund that the Board will use to support a pilot school-based community-identified project prioritized in the local education plan, on condition that the community raises a minimum counterpart.

5.  Building up local stakeholdership.  Essentially, this seeks to sustain local stakeholdership by effectively communicating the plan to stakeholders and institutionalizing a feedback mechanism that will enable the general public to engage the Board in a continuing dialog on education issues.

6.  Influencing national policy.  Essentially, this seeks to generate, discuss and document policy recommendations for strengthening Philippine LSBs through a roundtable discussion and publication of case studies of successful LSBs in the country.