(Facebook of Mayor Gerard Roger Espina)
TACLOBAN CITY- This town has developed a system that could probably address truancy among students.
The system, dubbed as student monitoring system and created by the information technology staff of the municipal government, was piloted on Wednesday (Nov.13) at the Naval Central School which has about 1,800 enrolled students.
Under the system, students before entering their classrooms have to scan first their identification cards to a monitor which will then send a text message to their parents’ mobile phones that they are already in school.
“The SMS (short message service) is created to increase the rate of attendance in schools, address problem on absenteeism and to update the parents regarding the whereabouts of their children,” Mayor Gerard Roger Espina said, explaining the advantages of the monitoring system.
“This is an intervention that can help in improving the attendance of our students,” he added.
Eight students from each section were chosen for the pilot testing of the application which was funded by the municipal government of more than P140,000.
The student monitoring system will also send a message to the parents if a teacher is absent in their class, class suspensions, important announcements, or if there is a school event.
“This technology has been there for many years, but in the region we are the first to implement this system in public schools,” Mayor Espina said.
“We will observe in the pilot testing first for one or two weeks and to know if what are other features that needs to be added before we can implement it in all public school in Naval,” he added.
A total of five kiosks were created by the municipal government for this purpose.
“If this turns out to be a success, we will implement it to other public schools in Naval,” Mayor Espina said.
Naval has 31 public schools where 27 are elementary schools and four are secondary schools. (ROEL T. AMAZONA)
