The Cebu City Council has discovered that there are no clear guidelines governing the city’s scholarship program.
City Hall’s P200 million scholarship program has over 12,000 beneficiaries.
Councilors in their recent session questioned the forfeiture of scholarship grants to those who shifted courses. They said City Hall’s scholarship committee has no legal basis to do so.
In an executive session with the scholarship committee chairperson Ida Yting, the councilors found out that City Ordinance 2333 which established the scholarship program has no implementing rules and regulations (IRR).
A draft IRR which is being perused by the committee also doesn’t specify a rule that scholars who decide to shift courses should be dropped from the scholarship program.
“All the councilors received different complaints from students of the scholarship program. Personally, I received more than 20 complaints,” said Carillo, who is also a member of the committee just this year.
Yting said they have warned scholars that they will face forfeiture of their grants if they shift to a totally different course. However, those who shift to others courses but within the same department of a college or university are allowed to so.
“Allowing scholars to shift courses will mean more cost for the city if they shift since they will start from the beginning because they’ll have different subjects,” Yting told the councilors.
The councilors asked her to submit a copy of the draft IRR to the City Council. The councilors said they wanted the scholarship program to have clear guidelines by next year.
Yting said there were 12,642 city scholars for the second semester of school year 2013-14.
Aside from the cases of forfeiture, Carillo said they also received complaints against the committee for its stringent requirements specifically the need for original copies of documents like birth certificates duly authenticated by the Philippine Statistics Authority, voter’s certification, among others.
Financial burden
“This means more financial burden on the part of the applicants. They will have to spend more than P1,000 for the documents alone,” Carillo said.
The scholarship program aims to help deserving students to pursue college degrees.
Under the program, the scholars get P11,000 per semester but those from the mountain barangays get an additional P10,000.