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The members of the Board of Trustees met on January 19 at the residence of Sir Fau, our headmaster, at Cubao, Quezon City. The following were some of the highlights of the meeting:
1. The tuition for kindergarten will remain at six thousand pesos (P6, 000.00) both for kinder 1 and kinder 2 for next school year.
2. There will be a two thousand peso (P2, 000.00) increase in the high school tuition and fees. The current tuition is P16, 500.00. Next school year it will be P18, 500.00. The parent counterpart of ESC recipients will be P13, 000.00 from P11, 000.00 this school year as the government pays P5, 500.00.
(Note: ESC or Education Service Contracting is a program of the government to subsidize the tuition fees of eligible students in some private schools. This is based on the premise that public high schools cannot accommodate all students who wish to avail of public high school education.)
3. Parents who have difficulty paying the P2, 000.00 increases in tuition next school year are welcome to apply for financial assistance particularly for the increase.
4. The parent counterpart of academic scholars and full financial grants will increase from P2,000.00 this year to P2, 500.00 next school year. The counterpart of the partial financial grantees will be determined by the financial assistance committee.
5. The school’s policy on sports was upheld by the Board of Trustees. In the absence of a Sagada team formed as early as June and trained every weekend, the school will send our team to the next level of sports competition only if they win first place in the lower level.
The triumph of a team depends largely on teamwork which cannot be developed overnight. It had been a practice that students are selected during the district meet and then they are pulled out from their classes at least two weeks before the provincial meet to practice with students from other schools. They usually miss three weeks of classes which might result to a drop on the academic performance of the athletes. Should the team been formed as early as June, this could be avoided.
6. The board policy on age requirement will remain until the full implementation of the K to 12 program of the government. In 2005, the board approved that a student has to be thirteen (13) years old by June 1 of his first year to be accepted at SMS. If not, the student has to stay for another year at SMS and take the fifth year program to be granted an SMS diploma. This policy will affect our current first to fourth year students. The incoming freshmen will surely attend six years of high school since the government will implement the K-12 Program in 2016.
The main reason for this policy is that the students need to be emotionally matured to make wise decisions regarding their career. We had been graduating students at age 15 as a result of the lowering of the entrance age of grade 1 pupils from 7 to 6 years old. We observed that they are the ones who usually shift courses in college.
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