Context and Rationale
Pursuant to the Civil Service Commission (CSC) memorandum circular number 01, s.2001 that “every department or agency shall establish its own employee suggestions and incentive awards system to encourage creativity, innovativeness, efficiency, integrity and productivity in the public service by recognizing and rewarding officials and employees, individually or in groups for their suggestions, inventions, superior accomplishments and other personal efforts which contribute to the efficiency, economy, or other improvement in government operations, or for other extraordinary acts or services in the public interest and this system was called Program on Awards and Incentives for Service Excellence (PRAISE)”.
In the Regional level, Gawad Patnugot is the name of the incentive award program that recognizes exemplary performance of teachers, instructional leaders, and non-teaching personnel who brought honor to their place of work in the Region and to the Nation as a whole. Thus, in the Division of Batangas Province, GawadBalisong is it’s counterpart where teachers, school heads, education program supervisors, public schools district supervisors and non-teaching personnel were recognized based on the given guidelines and criteria. Best/Most effective programs and SBM implementers as well as most effective action researches were one of the awards category given to instill deeper commitment to public service.
Under the municipality of Sto.Tomas, Batangas are the districts of Sto.Tomas North and South in which there are 15 private schools and 28 public elementary and 5 public high schools. On it’s road to cityhood, our municipality headed by Hon. Mayor Edna P. Sanchez gives incentive awards yearly to recognize also exemplary performance and behaviors of Tomasinos. However, there is no municipal ordinance issued by the local government to intensify the Gawad Tomasino awards thus the researchers were prompted to make a proposed Gawad Tomasino awards ordinance.
The researchers believe that giving awards motivate and inspire people to continue improve the quality of Tomasino performance towards excellence.