DepEd Memo No. 417 s. 2008

While Googling today, I was surprised to find DepEd Memo no. 417 s. 2008. All along we thought our application for DepEd endorsement of PLAI-STRLC "Regional Conference on Empowering Librarians in the 21st Century" and Annual General Assembly last September 24-26, 2008 was unacted for lact of time among other plausible reason(s) we can think of.

Almost on a weekly basis before the said conference, officers alternately followed up via a long distance phone call & check of the DepEd website for the endorsement to no avail. We just consoled ourselves before the start of the conference that we have the CHED and CSC endorsement anyway.

Our lesson learned from that application are as follows:

1) sending the application for endorsement of the conference via "snail mail" works.

We mailed our applications to the different government agencies via registed mail at the same time. The 2 agencies acted on time for us to include the endorsement in the emailed invitations and posted a pdf copy in our blog. I vividly recall at that time that we debated the merits of sending the application via mail vs personally handing it to the concerned agencies. We settled on the first option because we have 3 more months before the conference and I agreed to personally follow it up after a month of mailing the application.

2) personal follow up is still necessary.

As agreed, I went to CHED Head Office at Ortigas only to be told by the lady security guard that the office I need to visit for the endorsement transferred to the new CHED building at UP Diliman yesterday. Before I went to CHED, I was earlier at UP-SLIS and nobody informed me that CHED had a new office building within the campus. I decided to follow up first at DepEd before returning to UP Diliman at the new CHED building.

At DepEd, I hopped from one office to another tracking the whereabouts of the application letter until I was directed to visit the central mail processing office. Here, they have a database software tracking all the letters/communications received by DepEd. I saw sacks of letters being encoded to this database. No wonder even with a database system, the volume of mails being processed would truly create backlogs in encoding or being routed to concerned offices.

3) file (or mail) the request for endorsement at least 3-4 months before the activity.

This will allow reasonable time for the concern government agencies to act on the application and enough time for the association to include in the invitation letters the endorsement(s).