BAGUIO CITY—New government guidelines regulating the operations of nursing review centers are supposed to offer closure to the board cheating scandal that hit the nursing profession last year.
But operators of review centers servicing engineering, criminology, accountancy, medicine and education graduates said the implementing rules and regulations covering all review and tutorial operations in the country were actually drawn up to kill their industry.
Executive Order 566 authorized the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) to supervise the operations of all review centers shortly after a group of Baguio examinees exposed cheating during the June 2006 nursing board examinations.
Two nursing review firms who have branches in Baguio were implicated in the fraud that arose from the nursing licensure exposé, “so we anticipated that the government would soon conduct a crackdown on all review centers,” said Petronillo Ballesca, owner of the Baguio Review Center and Services, which offers review classes for graduates of engineering courses.
Before EO 566 was released, no government agency administered review schools.
But CHEd Memorandum Order 49, which outlines the new rules, asks all review centers to pay exorbitant fees and hire only highly trained teachers to continue operating, Ballesca said.
He said he is recruiting Baguio reviewers to join the Review Centers Association of the Philippines (Recap) based in Metro Manila so they can challenge the memorandum order in court next month.
“We know this started with two [big] review firms, but we never expected the government to also attack even small review firms which had nothing to do with that cheating scandal,” he said.
Noreen Daoayen, Baguio chapter president of the Philippine Nurses Association and one of the whistle-blowers in the cheating scandal, said the new rules were not what they had expected.
Daoayen said Baguio nursing school deans, local PNA members and the 92 nursing graduates who sued to freeze the June 2006 licensure test results wanted the government to control the review centers after they discovered clients of a review center distributing documents showing the examination questions and answers.
Recap apprised Margarita Jasmin, CHEd Cordillera director, about its concerns on Jan. 29 when she presented the new rules to local schools.
Jasmin said she would relay Recap’s concerns to CHEd Chair Carlito Puno, who supervised the drafting of the directive.
“I wouldn’t have minded if we were to be placed under government supervision but these new rules harass our operations. [These] attack our right to free enterprise. The rules appeared to have been drafted purposely to hurt everyone but the big players in the review business,” Ballesca said.
A local instructor told the Inquirer that the guidelines required her to pay P400,000 should she decide to conduct independent review classes.
