[av_one_full first min_height=” vertical_alignment=” space=” custom_margin=” margin=’0px’ padding=’0px’ border=” border_color=” radius=’0px’ background_color=” src=” background_position=’top left’ background_repeat=’no-repeat’ animation=”]
[av_heading heading=’P5M for Bacolod social center rehab ‘ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY MAE SINGUAY
[/av_heading]
[av_textblock size=” font_color=” color=”]
BACOLOD City – The city government has allocated P5 million for the rehabilitation of the Social Development Center (SDC).
The SDC in Barangay Taculing houses mendicants and serves as rehabilitation center for children in conflict with the law.
Executive Assistant Sammy Montoyo disclosed the rehabilitation was included in the city government’s 2017 Annual Investment Plan.
Montoyo, coordinator for the SDC and the Bacolod Boys’ Home under the Cluster on Social Services and Barangay Affairs, said he inspected the city hall-managed center and found out it needs rehab.
The Sangguniang Panlungsod had filed a resolution calling on Mayor Evelio Leonardia and concerned city government departments to look into the SDC’s poor maintenance and the reported abuse of its clients.
Councilor Bartolome Orola, author of the resolution, said he learned the center has a “detention-like environment.”
It has “indecent quarters, inadequate sanitary installations, dirty comfort rooms, clogged toilets, clogged septic tanks, and [no] drinking water stations.” Children are “sleeping on cold concrete,” he said.
Attached to the resolution was a letter an anonymous concerned citizen sent to City Administrator John Orola on Oct. 3.
The letter sender said they served as a missionary in Jackson, Mississippi, USA for two years and returned to the Philippines due to their “deep longing for service, especially to the poor, orphans and street children.”
Since serving at the SDC in April 2015, “I have seen and felt how underprivileged the already underprivileged was,” the sender said.
According to the letter sender, the center’s “prison” had “urine and wastes on the same floor where children sleep.”
They claimed a teenage girl was “beaten and tortured” by a police officer and children there “acquire communicable and noncommunicable diseases related to the intake of soiled food and unclean water.”
Non-potable water, bad hygiene and unsanitary facilities cause ill health at the center, and children there reportedly have highly contagious skin diseases, the councilors said.
They recommended that professionally trained people take charge of the SDC and monitor and supervise the children’s activities daily “to make sure their welfare and best interest are served.”
Montoyo said the essence of the SDC as a child-friendly center was “lost in the past three years.”
Some eight personnel have been working at the SDC voluntarily for years, Montoyo said. The executive assistant proposed that they be issued official appointments so they could be “professionalized.”/PN
[/av_textblock]
[/av_one_full]
