QUEZON City Vice Mayor Joy Belmonte is eyeing the establishment of child-care facilities for solo parents and working mothers.
She emphasized the value of education, saying there is a great need to put up more child-care facilities to enable single parents to work or go back to their studies.
Many young students are forced to drop out of school due to pregnancy and other unavoidable family obligations, Belmonte said.
“One of our future plans for single mothers is to have day-care facilities wherein children can be taken care of,” she added.
Such child minding facilities would be a big help to solo parents who are financially incapable of hiring a babysitter, the vice mayor noted.
Citing her encounters with many teenage mothers in the communities, she noted that many of them are eager to return to school and learn new skills but are unable to do so because no one will tend to their children.
“I’ll ask them—so what’s the problem? Why not just go back? Because no one would take care of my children,” she echoed the sentiments of the single mothers.
In the Quezon City Community College program, a few students also dropped out halfway to their courses due to time conflict; some had run out of money for fare expenses, Belmonte said.
“Maybe we need intervention and we can take it one step forward and provide additional assistance. Just to ensure that we can prevent dropouts,” she raised.
“Because really at the end of the day, education is a basic human right. Education is the right of every person. Let us not think that we cannot go back to school because of our age,” the vice mayor said.
She said it is never too late to go back to school, Belmonte encouraged city residents regardless of age to enroll in the program.