Six municipalities in Iloilo province were chosen as pilot sites for its Bulig Eskwela (BES) Basa (read) initiative, one of the pillars under the BES Probins program of Governor Arthur Defensor Jr.

The pilot classes will involve Grade 3 learners from the municipalities of Oton, San Miguel, Janiuay, Lambunao, Dingle and Carles, according to Iloilo provincial administrator Raul Banias during an interview on Monday.

“We started with six. We will roll these out to the whole province as soon as we can build experience and competency,” he said, adding that these school districts were recorded to have low performance in reading based on their assessment.

The governor has taken responsibility for the dismal performance of the province on education because of this.

Banias said the provincial government plans to extend this program to the whole Iloilo province.

Explaining the program, Banias said they chose Grade 3 since it is a “very critical level because if they cannot read, they will have difficulty progressing to higher levels,” thus they need to be capacitated to be able to read during the foundation stage.

“And the key is teachers. We should make all Grade 3 teachers reading teachers,” he added.

Over the weekend, they trained around 128 Grade 3 teachers from the pilot areas on teaching the Oral Graphic Symbolic Language (OGSL) program.

Led by the Public Schools District Supervisors (PSDS) of the Department of Education, the training covered topics such as Sound Symbol Overlay, Building Word Power, and Language Incorporation, with assessments and a workshop on the Work Application Plan (WAP).

Banias, also one of the original mentors of an education reform non-government organization (NGO) Synergia, said the trainees are DepEd-hired teachers so the capacity stays with them, making the program sustainable.

There will be regular assessments to gauge the impact of the program, he said.

The result of the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI), a classroom-based assessment tool to describe and measure the reading performance of a learner, showed over 75 percent of more than 180,000 learners in the province performed below the average, as non-readers and frustrated readers for the school year 2022-2023. (PNA)