Alpha Kevin-Hua, Lily Tan, Belle Shih, Aaron Prosch, Paula Hsien, Amy Wu, Mathew Teoh, Christina Guan. Who are they? These are students who were recently awarded the prestigious Governor Gen­eral Academic Medal in Burnaby Schools for the highest grade point average. Their pictures appeared in the Newsleader’s Feb. 3, 2012 issue. Why we are not represented in this list? Surely, there are a number of Filipino students in Burnaby’s secondary schools as well as in other schools throughout the lower mainland. When did we last saw a Filipino stu­dent featured in our own media? Instead, our own newspapers feature achievers in song and dance and we don’t usually see or read about academic excellence. It is not that we don’t want to encour­age achievement in music and entertain­ment. But surely, we want to encourage achievement in the academic field too for there lies our key to the advancement of our community. We all have a role to play if we are to achieve excellence in the field of aca­demics.

The media plays the most important as this is where the public sees their fac­es reflected and the young can look for models to aspire to. As parents, we have to nurture and inspire our children that there is some­thing beyond Canadian Idol. As a community, we can set up a schol­arship fund to help outstanding students proceed to university. We know the tre­mendous cost of tuition fees so anything even how small helps.
More so, a scholarship fund sends a signal to our youth that we value educa­tion.

While the local University of Santo To­mas alumni association started a schol­arship fund some years ago, its focus is funding students in the Philippines and not here. In contrast, Winnipeg’s Univ. of San­to Tomas alumni have been awarding scholarships to Manitoba students for more than two decades now. Their ef­forts in encouraging academic endeav­ours is commendable and perhaps the results are apparent.

While Manitoba’s Filipino population is smaller than B.C., there are probably more Filipinos in post-secondary educa­tion there than we have in B.C.

It is high time community leaders in this province think seriously about how to find ways to motivate our youth. If we don’t, we will always remain hew­ers of wood and gatherers of water.

-Ted Alcuitas

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