HSBC awards five outstanding principals

With the belief that it is the school leaders who transform the educational system into effective bastions of learning, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp. (HSBC) recently awarded five outstanding elementary school principals who passed the HSBC Principals Leadership Enhancement and Development (LEAD) Program (PLP) with flying colors.

Shown in photo is one of the awardees, Zenaida S. Penafuerte (middle) of Rizal Elementary School. She is flanked by (from right) HSBC President and CEO Tony Cripps, Corporate Sustainability officer Denise Roque, Margarita Delgado and Lizzie Zobel of the non-government organization Sa Aklat Sisikat.

The rest of the awardees are Marilyn C. Macalma of Cembo Elementary School; Dr. Elita T. Lopez of Comembo Elementary School; Marciana De Guzman of Nangka Elementary School; and Aurora Marcelino of P. Manalo Elementary School. They were chosen based on their post-program performance as well as their ratings from school visits after attending the PLP conferences.

“We at HSBC are pleased to honor these five remarkable principals who lived up to the PLP mission of making significant impact to their schools,” said Mr. Cripps. “They displayed exemplary leadership and has shown how they can be effective CEOs of their schools in accordance with the best-practice strategies learned from the PLP conference.”

In 2009, Sa Aklat Sisikat together with HSBC launched the Principals Leadership Enhancement and Development Program (PLP) in response to Republic Act 9155 that gave principals full authority and responsibility for the effective management of their schools. The program aids principals to identify the needs and problems of their schools and community, and equips them with the necessary tools to revise the standard curriculum to address these.

Since the program’s inception, PLP has trained 200 principals from various schools all over the Philippines in three separate batches. It was also through the program that the Principal’s Handbook was developed by SAS and distributed nationwide. The handbook has guided numerous principals in their everyday work as community leaders.

Up next, the HSBC and SAS are bracing for yet another significant undertaking. The Teach for the Philippines (TFP) program is a new program of Sa Aklat Sisikat that HSBC will be supporting. The program will help address the scale and magnitude of the crisis in education in the country by recruiting and training top students from universities and then fielding them in public schools.

HSBC is donating PhP 3 million to TFP – 1 million from local fund and 2 million through a grant awarded by the HSBC Global Education Program.

“Our programs with SAS illustrate an effective and sustainable partnership” says Cripps. “Our programs have continuously evolved –starting with reading programs for students then moving towards educator training and now our aim is to train students to become teachers. We believe that the contribution we make to society through programs like these underpins the success of our business in the long term and we are very excited to highlight our strengthened commitment to education with this new program. “