GUBAT, Sorsogon--- Ligaya Avenida, a native of this town, was the first one to apply direct mass hiring of teachers from the Philippines to work in the United States at the time when the public schools in San Francisco was bursting with immigrants from Asian and South American countries.

        Avenida said the school officials and teachers, given the edgy atmosphere of mixed races and cultures in the school, were deep into brainstorming how to diffuse the growing tension building up when she made a proposal that gained approval from higher school authorities of the public school district of San Francisco.

Ligaya Avenida is an innovative and a dynamic leader who believes in an "out of the box" approach to solving problems. She has developed many programs and successfully received millions of grant awards that benefited the children of San Francisco.

        “My proposal to solve the tension was to hire teachers of the same nationalities as the students in the public school to teach bilingual and cultural education to the students and parents,” she revealed.

Cultural tension
        Avenida was then teaching high school at San Francisco Public School when her concept of defusing the cultural tension paid off in less than year.

        It did not take long when the district education officials noticed her and then she was promoted to act as director of the newly created bilingual program which was solely based on her concept.

        Her concept was to recruit teachers directly from the country or region origin of ethnic groups present in the school filled with cultural tension.

        “As director of bilingual program, I supervised the recruitment and training of teachers from Spain and the Philippines,” Avenida revealed.

        She said the strategy was to hire Filipino and Spanish teachers who would teach the immigrants second language acquisition while learning two cultures as they integrate into the American society, at the same time.

        Avenida was further promoted to head the human resource department when the San Francisco Public School District was faced with vacancies of some 400 teachers retiring simultaneously.

        She said the problem of shortage was projected to arise at the math and science subjects and they had to process and hire replacements again in less than a year before the opening of the proceeding school year.

Massive recruitment
        Applying the same strategy that she used as director of bilingual program, Avenida launched massive recruitment of mathematics and science teachers from Mexico, Hongkong and the Philippines in 1998.

        She maintained her position as director of human resources of San Francisco Public School until she retired to put up her own firm, the Avenida International Consultants, Inc., a professional staffing and training agency which developed the International Teacher Placement Program.

        Avenida also serves as consultant to several school systems in the United States in addressing the critical shortage of qualified teachers.

        For the past five years, the Bicolana said her firm has already provided to some 500 Filipino teachers who migrated to America for better paying jobs in which, she said, she’s proud to say that 90 percent of them remained in their jobs.

        Avenida said she could just have satisfied herself to grow old as a homemaker if not for her mother.

Mother’s wisdom
        She realized the wisdom of her mother as she traced her way to build a pioneering job placement firm for science and mathematic teachers in the public school system of San Francisco, California.

        Avenida said that one day in the US, at the time when she had started to settle down playing the role of a full-time mother, her mother, a retired teacher, scolded her while observing her fold and keeping tiny little dresses in a baby’s closet.

        She once was a first grade school teacher at St. Paul of Shipwreck in San Francisco, California until she married in 1965 and quitted her job to be homemaker of her young family.

        Avenida recalled that her mother was serious when she scolded her that she was not sent to the University of the Philippines to finish a degree in Social Work just to take care of her kids the rest of her lifetime. She graduated AB Social Work in UP Diliman in 1960 and migrated in 1963 to the US to work.

        She revealed that she did not really miss her teaching job that time because she was already adjusted to her role as a full-time mother while her husband Rannie earned enough to provide their young family the needs of a middle-class American home.

        Avenida said her mother, who had just arrived in their home in San Francisco from the Philippines, ordered her to find teaching job as a substitute teacher three days in a week while the latter pledged to take over her responsibilities at home.

        Unknown to her, her mother’s wish was the cornerstone that led her to build a pioneering job placement firm that caters to the needs of the public schools in the US.