The number of teachers who actually teach, however, diminishes when they are called on to handle administrative matters. Dino’s teacher, for example, is also the school principal, which is why the classes she handles are suspended whenever she has meetings or seminars to attend either in the capital, Shariff Aguak, or the ARMM’s seat of power, Cotabato City.

	THE Maguindanao provincial capitol [photo by Jaileen Jimeno]

Yet the few schoolteachers there complain that their pay is often delayed, sometimes even for months. With little incentive for professionals to apply, there is thus a heavy dependence on volunteer teachers, who have usually reached high school at least and are able to teach basic reading and writing. These volunteer teachers get about P3,000 per month. Often, half the amount is sourced from barangay funds, while parents chip in to cover the other half. Problems occur whenever some parents are unable to cough up their share.

One mother here said that each family contributes P30 every month for each child it sends to school. She and her husband have three school-age children, which means they have to come up with P90 each month; she has resorted to selling charcoal to raise the amount.

The mother said she dreads the time when they will have to produce P50 every day for the transportation fare of each of their children, who will have to go farther to attend Grades 5 and 6.

Their barangay is five kilometers of boulders-strewn road away from the highway, accessible only by habal-habal or motorcycles for hire. From there, the children would have to take another ride before reaching a school that conducts classes in grade levels higher than the one they are now attending.

Asked for the province’s budget allocations for education and the building of classrooms since 2001, Maguindanao’s budget office said it had “no data” on these items.

NO SCHOOL BUILT SINCE 2001
Data from both the province’s budget and education offices indicate, however, that the province has not allocated any part of its public-works fund to build schools since 2001.

Still, the province has poured millions of pesos into other infrastructure projects. In 2006 alone, the 22-town province spent more than P91 million in 37 road rehabilitation projects, with just one costing less than P1 million. Roughly a third of the projects were for roads in Shariff Aguak.

A kapitolyo insider said that last year, the planning office had tried to set aside P100,000 for an information campaign to familiarize the province’s mayors with the MDGs. “We wanted to incorporate the MDGs in the province’s goals,” said the insider, “but the proposal and the funding was junked.”

And that may be why, when an ARMM information officer was queried for data on the region’s MDG programs, he had to ask what the three letters meant.

Meantime, Dino may have difficulty recognizing any letter of the alphabet. At 10, he is still unable to read.