Review schools’ regulation studied

By Vincent Cabreza
Inquirer
Last updated 00:30am (Mla time) 06/29/2006

Published on Page A13 of the June 29, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

BAGUIO CITY—The Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) is studying the legal status of review centers in the city after a nursing review school here was implicated in alleged irregularities during the June 11 and 12 licensing examinations.
Magdalena Jasmin, CHEd Cordillera director, said all of the review centers that the commission has encountered, which offer crash courses for aspiring lawyers, nurses and other professions, “only operate using business licenses issued by local governments,” and are therefore beyond the jurisdiction of state education regulators.
About 100 nursing graduates and deans of nursing schools in Baguio have petitioned the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) to delay the release of the test results on July 2, and to put the members of the board of nursing under “preventive suspension” pending an investigation of the alleged irregularities.
They claimed that the R.A. Gapuz Review Center distributed copies of the test questions and answers that were allegedly leaked to the reviewers by a member or members of the nursing review board.
The review center’s officials said the complainants might have mistaken for “leakage” their routine distribution of “emergency” test scenarios on the eve of each licensing examinations.
Jasmin said the existence of review schools should concern government educators because “their continued operation is an implied criticism of the way our education system has failed, and we should not let this slide.”
Officials of Baguio’s nursing community also asked the city council to investigate the alleged irregularities.
Mary Grace Lacanaria, Cordillera president of the Association of Deans of Philippine Colleges of Nursing (ADPCN), and Norenia Dao-ayen, Baguio chapter president of the Philippine Nurses Association, urged the council to intercede on their behalf to prod PRC to immediately act on the allegations.
“Although the examinees, who claimed that there was leakage, were examinees from Baguio City, we were not discounting the possibility that the phenomenon could have happened nationwide,” Lacanaria and Dao-ayen said in a June 23 letter to the council.
“We are saddened by the fact that action coming from PRC and our own nursing leaders is slow. We feel that the initiative of the [Baguio] examinees will open a can of worms [which explains] the sweeping [PRC] statement ... that ‘there is no leakage.’ A conclusion has been arrived (at) and yet no investigation has been conducted,” they said.
The council voted on Monday to pass a resolution that warned the PRC against a “whitewash” of the investigation of the alleged irregularities in the recent nursing board examinations.