We have received several complaints from parents who applied to have their children admitted to the SPED school in Kalayaan.
For those that don’t know SPED is a government funded elementary school for gifted children, that is children with above average intelligence.
As class sizes are kept to a minimum, limited slots are available so children are put through an “entrance exam” and evaluation, including an IQ test. It has however become the practice of the school staff to manipulate the presentation of the results and make excuses so their own children or children of their friends and relatives qualify before others, especially disadvantaging children with foreign blood.
This year many children who had one foreign parent were failed only on the basis that the children where "not good in Tagalog” with the schools principle asserting herself in a most demeaning and racist way saying “we are in the Philippines you know” to foreign investors residing in the Freeport.
To disqualify 5 year old children who have qualified in intellectual terms because they don’t live in a 100% Filipino family is outright racist!
Clearly, for a 5-10 year old gifted child, (spoken at home level of) proficiency in Tagalog is not the measurement of intelligence or the child's potential. Are the teachers of SPED so pathetic that they believe Tagalog is the sign or of a gifted child? We decided to dig deeper and it seems the children that are accepted are more frequently the children who are friends and relatives of the teachers.
Now maybe some people might say they are just getting the best for their kids but we say they a cheating the government by displacing genuinely gifted children so they can steal a higher level of education for their friends and family. It’s theft of services, nothing less.
We don’t know what the terms of the lease are for SPED, but SBMA should open an investigation as to why so many qualifying children of investors are being cheated out of the value of a Freeport facility, a facility that would surely be an attraction to investors with families.
Why are these teachers and the principle not being properly monitored by the education department?
