CALTEX, A GOOD PANDACAN NEIGHBOR For four Saturdays last school year, men and women in red shirts that sported the Caltex Star sat with first-graders in a school in Pandacan. What was the Caltex Star, symbol of petroleum energy, doing in school? The red-shirted men and women were volunteers in the Caltex Mentor Program (CMP), the first attempt of a private organization to provide actual hands-on help in education. The first CMP project focused on improving the reading skills of first-graders through one-on-one mentoring. Thirty Caltex employee-volunteers and their spouses underwent a comprehensive training program to prepare them to teach English and Pilipino reading skills. They were assigned to first-graders because these are the easiest group to mentor for teachers with no previous teaching experience. Eighty-three students from a group of 187 non-readers participated in the project. The CMP also measured the effectivity of the mentoring through student assessments and post-project evaluations. Of the 83 students that had taken the remedial reading program, 51 passed the Oral Reading Assessment exam. The reading skills built through mentoring program will not grow unless the students have a interesting variety of reading material available. Caltex has therefore endowed the school with a Learning Resource Center that provides a range of educational material for the students and teachers to use. The remedial reading program is just the beginning. Caltex hopes to build a team of employee-volunteers for the CMP that will undertake science, math, and computer mentoring as well. The CMP will also be implemented in Batangas. The CMP is just one of many Pandacan community projects that Caltex is involved in. Some others are: Earn While You Learn Toothful Neighbor Come on, baby, fight the fire Magandang Tabi, Bayan.
I shirt the sheriff and I even clad the deputies. § |
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