A Lesson in Empowerment

ON SATURDAY, Dec. 11, more than 50 Filipino teachers, parents and school administrators gathered at the San Francisco School Board auditorium to organize themselves into an advocacy group that would formulate and advance the "Filipino Education Agenda."

San Francisco has 58,750 students enrolled in its public schools (K-12), down from a high of 93,710 students in 1967-68. Of its current number of students, 6.1 percent are Filipinos, down from a high of 9 percent in 1987-88.

Out of 260 San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) administrators, only five are Filipinos, down from 15 just 15 years ago. And two of them (Dr. Maria Manuel and Juliet Montevirgen) are retiring in the next year, with only one Filipino (Maria Derus) in the pipeline as an administrative intern.

Three of the Filipino administrators are principals: Dr. Maria Manuel of the El Dorado Elementary School, Jeff Burgos of the Bessie Carmichael Elementary School/Filipino Education Center, and Mary Lou Cranna of Hillcrest Elementary School. Another, Aurora Maramag, is vice principal of Visitation Valley Middle School, and the fifth, Juliet Montevirgen, is Executive Director for State and Federal Programs.

Out of 6,600 teachers in the SFUSD, 207 are Filipinos.

While other ethnic groups have made impressive advances in increasing their percentage of administrators and school teachers, Filipinos have marched in the opposite direction, seeing a progressive decline in numbers and influence.

Out of 7 elected members of the School Board, three are Chinese Americans: Eric Mar, Eddie Chin and Norman Yee. No Filipino serves on it and none have run since 1988. Five of San Francisco's public schools have been renamed after Chinese Americans, none after a Filipino.

I shared with the group my experience as an elected member of the College Board which runs the San Francisco Community College District of 110,000 students.

Sometime after I was elected to the board in 1992, an issue affecting our community came up. There were 40 vacancies of full-time instructors and the State had only provided us with enough funds to fill six. The Philippine Studies program badly needed a full-time slot to teach and coordinate the program. But we were up against other equally deserving programs.

So we had to organize. We rallied our community to speak to our Board to present the case for why one of those coveted slots should be allotted to our program.

At the College Board meeting, one by one, each of our community speakers made the case for a full-time Philippine Studies instructor.

It was a strange experience for me as I would usually be one of the community advocates pounding away at the injustice of having a program without a coordinator who would work to preserve and expand it.

But I was now on the unfamiliar other side of the podium, listening to advocates and wielding the power to decide the fate of an issue.

As I listened to the Filipino community speakers, many of whom I personally requested to speak on behalf of the issue, I started to hear the music of our kundiman.

The kundiman is Filipino folk music that speaks of unrequited love. It is a contraction of the Tagalog words "kung hindi man" which means "if it is not to be." It speaks of a love that is spurned but remains true to heart.

The love song, "Kapantay ay Langit" by the late George Canseco, contains these typical expressions of undying love "Mahal kita, kapantay ay langit sinta, at lagi kong dasal sa Maykapal, ang lumigaya ka, kahit ngayon, mayroon ka nang ibang mahal, hinding-hindi pa run ako magdaramdam, ngunit sinta, sakaling paluhain ka, magbalik ka lamang, naghihintay, puso ko't kaluluwa."

("I love you, a love equal to heaven, dearest, and it is my fervent prayer to God, that you be happy. Even though you now love another, I won't be bitter. But if he makes you cry, come back to me, my heart and soul await you.")

I visualized images of 300 years of Spanish cacique rule where our people were reduced to being farm tenants in their own land, now owned by the Spanish rulers, who demanded a larger proportion of the produce of the land. "Please, Don Jose, allow us to have a decent share of the harvest. We need it to have enough to eat, to survive. Please, Don Jose, lend us money to buy seedlings to grow in our land. Please, Don Jose, we need medicine. Please, Don Jose." These would be the plaintive cries of our poor farmers.

"We have not complained in the past," said one community speaker to our College Board, "when other ethnic programs got funded and we were ignored. But we ask you now to please don't ignore us this time. Without this full-time slot, there will be no one to coordinate our classes and no one develop new classes to expand our program. To not fund this slot is to ensure the demise of our program. Please, we implore you."

This was the way we always did it to advocate for our issues. We would gather our community together, prepare for the forum where our speakers would speak on behalf of our issues with our community in massive attendance in the audience. Isn't this how other groups do it?

I had thought so at least until I got on the College Board. On the board, I heard other community groups make their pitch for their issues and I saw how they did it. The more sophisticated ones would meet with us individually for lunch and educate us about their issues. They would point out that their programs would increase the number of students attending City College and this would increase our state funding which is principally dependent on full-time equivalent (FTE) student enrollment. It would be a "win-win" for their department and for our college.

Other groups would support us in our election efforts and count on their support to win a sympathetic ear for their issues, which is the norm in politics.

They did not come as Filipinos are wont to do with a supplicant's hat in hand but with a firm handshake, as equal partners engaged in the mutually beneficial goal of educating all our communities.

That is our challenge, I told the group, to develop a more sophisticated approach to identifying and advancing our goals.

By the way, we got one of the six prized slots because I am on the College Board. And that slot is now filled by Leo Paz, who coordinates a program that currently offers 21 Philippine Studies courses at City College.

Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com. Rodis was re-elected to a fourth term on the SF College Board in November 2004, receiving 111,506 votes in San Francisco.