Baguio Insider

Politicians have been calling for the development of the Baguio La Trinidad Itogon Sablan Tuba areas (BLIST) for a Metro Baguio, but they are proposing only residential communities there. All big business is still concentrated in the Central Business District — and I’m not talking about hotels and restaurants.

Baguio Schools Must Move Out of the Center of Town

The big businesses that contribute greatly to the congestion of Baguio would be the schools, with small campuses relative to their extra-large populations. The students have to be transported, fed and housed on a daily basis. Thus all auxiliary services such as carinderias, dormitories, copy centers, school supply stores, internet gaming shops will mushroom all around the schools.

Based on the 2005-2010 Medium Term Development Plan authored by the city government when Peter Rey Bautista was still acting mayor, of which I was given a copy:

1. The total enrollees for all levels for the school year (2004) was 137,289 students:

• College level = 49.21% or 67,560 students
• Secondary = 20.92% or 28,721 students
• Elementary = 29.87% or 41,008 students

2. There are a whopping 209 schools operating in Baguio, both public and private:

• 54 are pre-elementary
• 66 are elementary schools
• 43 are secondary schools
• 7 universities and colleges
• 37 vocational schools
• 2 schools for the physically handicapped

3. The population of Baguio in 2005 was estimated at 285,278. Thus about half the city’s population is composed of students.

We can glean from this report that since only about 21% of the student population is in secondary schools, then most likely this same number will try to earn a college degree in Baguio. But the college population is almost half of the total student population and more than double the high school population, then I believe we can safely say that about 30% of the total student population (more than half of the college population) is from out of town. In numbers, about 38,389 students will need dormitories because their parents are in the lowlands.

Oh, don’t get turned off by these numbers. They mean something, you know. What is the use of statistics if we do not analyze them?

So, if we have 137,289 students going to the center of town daily, of course Baguio will be congested. We add to these numbers the teachers, the administrative staff, the yayas, the canteen operators, etc, etc. They all have to be transported too! So we have to add the jeepney drivers who hang around the center of town waiting for them to get dismissed!

Of course no dormitory will survive in Itogon, for example. It’s considered too far from the city center. Neither will a carinderia. In fact, if you are a mom, you wouldn’t want to live far from where your child studies. So why, in heaven’s name would you want to decongest Baguio and move to Itogon?

So all this talk of decongesting Baguio is futile if the lucrative business of issuing diplomas is concentrated in the center of town, wouldn’t you think?

What the Mayor wants is for the schools to stay in the center of town, amid all the viable tourist attractions, and for the tourists to stay away from Baguio, when the schools need not be in the central business district to survive earn oodles and oodles of money but the tourists do, to enjoy all the historic, cultural, man-made and natural attractions that Baguio has to offer.

In fact, what developers of subdivisions and new communities do is provide space for a good school within the subdivision or development to attract residents. So all these folks who are crying “BLIST” should plan for thriving residential and commercial communities to attract folks to move out of the center of town.

And if the local officials used their heads, they would study to reroute the jeepneys so their routes do not begin and end in the Central Business District. Who would want to live in Itogon, which is very nice by the way, if the Itogon jeepney is sitting around all day in the center of town waiting for passengers there?

Baguio used to run out of water only on Holy Week when we had a massive influx of tourists. Now we have students depleting it all year round. And at least 38,000 of them coming from the lowlands. Oh, and yes, plus the carinderia owners from the lowlands, the illegal peddlers from the lowlands, taxi drivers from the lowlands .. and the list goes on.

I would not discriminate against lowlanders, being one myself, if Baguio policies were to attract only productive, classy and well-meaning lowlanders to INVEST here and not allow just about anyone to live off our natural resources virtually for free!

Oh, and by the way, we have not even touched the topic of the Korean schools mushrooming all over town.

The point here is, move the schools out of the Central Business District, the rest will follow.

Why will the schools not want to move out of the center of Baguio?

Because Baguio parks and streets are being used as extensions of a lot of tree-less, lounge-less, quadrangle-less, cafeteria-less, parking-less universities for free! I can use the word “-less” if the facilities they have a serve a negligible percentage of their total population.

Because they are not regulated except on a student to classroom ratio. There is no such thing, I believe, as a required population density level (e.g. student to square meter ratio). Because the folks here do not care about the safety of their children as far as disaster, natural (earthquake) or man-made (building structural capacities), and evacuation (narrow congested corridors, ample fire exits, enough exits) is concerned. Because the parents are not demanding more for their money (more student organization lounges, extra and co-curricular activities that may help their children determine their career paths).

Honestly, has UB, for example, held a fire drill at full capacity to determine if they can evacuate a few tens of thousands in a few minutes?

Because they do not care to give the children room to breathe — no intellectual discourses under trees, just a lot of jostling in corridors. Heck, even varsity ping pong athletes are made to practice in the corridors at times!

• If Peter Rey wants a parking building erected on Burnham Park, why does he not require UC, UB and SLU to provide parking buildings for their students, teachers and staff first? Why should the city spend if they are the ones who need parking?

These above mentioned three largest universities have an estimated population of 10,000, 20,000 and 22,000 students respectively. We do not even take into consideration their faculty, staff and concessionaires in the head count. We can therefor say that THEY are the three largest contributors to the congestion of Baguio. And yet, they are held unaccountable for all the environmental ills that are consequences of the unhampered admissions into these schools, without even taking into account social issues such as teenage pregnancies, juvenile crime, abortions, HIV, etc.

• If they want to spend millions of public funds to develop the children’s playground, why should the schools not sponsor that instead? They should be providing playgrounds on campus so the kids do not spill out where they are unprotected.

How come the UC high school is using a barangay basketball court as their outdoor gym, where any kanto boy is free to enter and molest the little girls?

• If Baguio schools were concerned about the welfare of their students and not merely the tuition fees they collect, should they not offer ample space for cafeterias where they can monitor the safe and healthy preparation of meals instead of encouraging through their inaction the eating of badly prepared foods cooked by the road sides of General Luna and the little side streets of jologs Baguio CBD?

Apparently the City Health officers should be censured for not monitoring the quality of foods served in the carinderias and turo-turos; they keep focusing on the health of food handlers but not on food handling and preparation itself. How about assigning microscopes in each carinderia to see how much bacteria is still wriggling around after the food is reheated?

• If the schools KNOW that a majority of their college population comes from the lowlands, should they not be required to provide dormitories, again that they can control and monitor for the safety and well being of their students? In the absence of parents, teachers and schools assume a subsidiary/secondary liability for their welfare. Just because, at 18 they are legally adults, does not mean they are grown-up and can make proper decisions.

In fact I cannot understand the Baguio-born residents resentment towards lowlanders being limited to just the tourists when in fact it is the resident lowlanders who trash Baguio all year round. Baguio is no longer dirty during tourist season — it is dirty all year round!

On the street where I live there are 2 popular private elementary and high schools and very few residents (as most of the houses are private vacation homes on large properties). However, every school day there are candy wrappers thrown all around by these students all over the street that I have to clean up — just to show you that these children are not being taught social responsibility at all! I know their parents and some grandparents, they are all from Baguio.

Where will the city get land to relocate the schools?

Almost all of Baguio is government/public land. Even if there is an assessment of real property held by a homesteader, the land still belongs to the government. In fact, even if you hold title to land, the city can still take that away from you. The government has power of eminent domain and can expropriate private land for public use. What more if the government already OWNS the land?

Would it not be in the interest of Baguio to maybe GIVE the schools (since the owners are either too stingy or greedy or both to expand their campuses) a few hectares in Beckel or Sablan for the schools to relocate to? And promise them that all jeepneys will head towards those areas instead?

Finally, over poker-chismis-drinking sessions the last 8 years or so, I have been trying to convince the younger generation of a prominent family that owns a lucrative Baguio university to already look towards expanding or relocating to the BLIST areas, or even the lowlands where a majority of their students come from. They earn so much from tuition and yet maintain only such a small campus for their students, so I know there is a lot of money left over to build a real campus (Latin for ‘field’ or ‘open space’) where it will hurt neither Baguio nor their income. Instead, they keep building building after nondescript building in their highly congested campus.

It is no longer now a question of whether they could, but rather that they SHOULD — for the love of Baguio.