INAUGURATED AT the height of the campaign period for the 2007 polls, the project has not escaped the intrigues of electoral politics. Robredo's political rivals, in fact, immediately criticized it as a ploy to boost the incumbent mayor's reelection bid. Camarines Sur Representative Luis Villafuerte, running for reelection in the province's first district that includes voters from Naga, even had his own scholarship program called “Vlessed” to match QUEEN.

It’s still too early to have a real assessment of QUEEN’s impact, but local officials are already waiting for this school year's enrolment figures to see if the program has made a difference even just after one full year of implementation. “We should at least see more than 70 percent of those in Grade I moving to Grade II this year,” says Prilles, anticipating an incremental improvement of at least two percentage points.

Table 1: Goal 2 — Achieve Universal Primary Education Target: Achieve universal access to primary education by 2015 Indicator: Cohort survival rate in primary education Source: NEDA Region V MDGs Report, 2005
PROVINCE/CITY	BASELINE (1990)	CURRENT (2004)	TARGET (2015)	RATIO OF REQUIRED RATE TO AVERAGE RATE OF PROGRESS	PROBABILITY OF ATTAINING THE TARGET
PROVINCE
Albay	72.93	81.97	100	2.18	Low
Camarines Norte	80.38	91.21	100	0.89	High
Camarines Sur	68.67	75.36	100	4.02	Low
Catanduanes	72.18	90.98	100	0.52	High
Masbate	47.37	70.53	100	1.39	High
Sorsogon	65.01	82.54	100	1.09	High
CITY
Iriga	77.23	82.99	100	3.22	Low
Legazpi	86.06	84.01	100	8.51	Low
Naga	80.67	76.95	100	6.76	Low
REGION V	66.68	79.45	100	1.76	Medium

For QUEEN's initial year, the school board had allocated P3 million, an amount that enabled Naga City to cover a maximum of 6,000 pupils, or 25 percent of the city's elementary enrolment last year. This translated to a maximum budget of P500 per student, or equivalent to a 75-percent subsidy in school fees.

For this year, the allocation has been increased to P9 million to accommodate 60 to 70 percent of about 18,000 elementary school students, or two out of every three enrolled students. The Naga school board budget allocation for pupil/student development actually increased by 243 percent, largely driven by the institutionalization of the QUEEN and QUEEN Plus (the same program targeting high school students) initiatives with the passage of City Ordinance 2007-045 last year.

It helps that “Good Schools” is one of the 12 key result areas or milestones that the city government aims to achieve as part of its An Maogmang Lugar (A Happy Place) vision for Naga. The active involvement in the planning and budgeting process of the Naga City People's Council (NCPC) — the city-level federation of over a hundred local NGOs and people’s organizations co-governing Naga since 1995 — also ensures that the budgetary allocations are aligned with the city's vision-mission statements and scorecards to which the MDGs have been incorporated.

Consultation has been part and parcel of Naga City’s way of doing things under Robredo. The current three-year education plan, for instance, was actually the result of the school board's consultations with local communities, including parents, teachers, and school officials, way back in 2002 regarding the state of the public school system in Naga. The plan was completed and launched in 2005.

Already a priority in previous years, education has all the more become a top concern for the Naga city government after NEDA’s assessment of its MDG performance. Thus, the city's education budget — which is sourced primarily from the school board-managed Special Education Fund (SEF) from the one percent tax levied on real property — almost doubled to P50 million from only P28.5 million in 2006 this year. Though a big chunk (36 percent) of the budget goes to personal services (particularly to salaries of 116 teaching and 12 non-teaching staff), allocations for instructional materials, pupil/student development, information technology, and special programs and projects (including new initiatives like a summer enrichment program for teachers) have all gained substantial increases. Five new school buildings are also to be built within the year.

	THE Naga City School Board has prioritized investments in information technology like the Computer Literacy and Instructional Center for Kids (CLICK) that provided computer hardware to elementary schools. [photo courtesy of Bob Ursua/NCSB]

On top of the school board-managed SEF, the city has set aside P9 million from the executive budget for other education-related initiatives, including a P4-million allocation to the Sanggawadan Program. This is an offshoot of the Street and Urban Working Children Project (SUWCP) funded by the Australian Aid Agency (AusAid) in 2000 to provide school children with rice subsidies as a way of improving their school attendance.

The AusAid initiative was implemented in Naga and 24 other pilot cities. Naga, however, continued with the project even after funding from AusAid ran out in 2001. The city's social welfare and development office adopted the project, rebranding it as Sanggawadan — which in Bikol loosely means “to help raise up” — to extend not only rice incentives to the families of 1,596 indigent school children, but also to cover their basic entrance school fees and school supplies.

Seeing what Prilles calls its strong educational orientation, the Naga City School Board decided to support Sanggawadan with regular funding allocation from its annual budget starting in 2006. As a result, some 2,000 school children have been added as beneficiaries.

LAST YEAR, the school board also began funding Nutri-Dunong, an in-school focused feeding program introduced by the city government after an “Operation Timbang” survey revealed that one out of five public-school children to be underweight. For its pilot implementation, the feeding program targeted five big public schools with the highest incidence of malnutrition among elementary students.

Noting a 65-percent improvement in school children's weights, the school board this year has expanded Nutri-Dunong’s coverage to all of Naga's 29 public elementary schools, more than doubling its funding support for the program from P500,000 to P1.2 million.

Table 1: Goal 1 — Eradicate Extreme Poverty & Hunger Target: Half the proportion of underweight among 0-5 year old children Indicator: Proportion of underweight among 0-5 year old children based on IRS Source: NEDA Region V MDGs Report, 2005
PROVINCE/CITY	BASELINE (2003)	CURRENT (2004)	TARGET (2015)	RATIO OF REQUIRED RATE TO AVERAGE RATE OF PROGRESS	PROBABILITY OF ATTAINING THE TARGET
PROVINCE
Albay	40.5	23.1	20.25	0.01	High
Camarines Norte	21.2	17.5	10.6	0.17	High
Camarines Sur	41.4	26.5	20.7	0.04	High
Catanduanes	34.9	23.8	17.45	0.05	High
Masbate	35.5	24.4	17.75	0.05	High
Sorsogon	21.8	20.8	10.9	0.90	High
CITY
Iriga	10.4	9.8	5.2	0.70	High
Legazpi	25.6	16.0	12.8	0.03	High
Naga	6.7	5.6	3.35	0.19	High
REGION V	33.6	22.6	16.8	0.05	High

Nutri-Dunong is actually only one of several hunger-mitigation measures instituted by the City Population and Nutrition Office. Other programs like Nutri-Nanay and Nutri-Ataman (“to take care” in Bikol) have been in existence for close to two decades now. The former provides free medical check-ups (every other Sunday) and food assistance in the form of milk and cereals, to pregnant and lactating mothers, while the latter conducts feeding programs to preschoolers, especially those with severe malnutrition cases.

These days, Naga's malnutrition rate among children aged five and below is the lowest in the region, and even for the rest of the country. From an already low 5.6 percent in 2004, the proportion of underweight children had been further reduced to 4.2 percent in 2006, surpassing this particular target for the MDG to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger 10 years ahead of schedule. Naga has also already achieved the target to cut by half its poverty incidence, which stood at one of every five households living below the poverty line, also the lowest in the region that is the fourth poorest in the country.