The management committee of the Philippine Science High School recommended that students involved in voyeuristic acts be barred from graduation but its board of trustees decided otherwise.
In a statement released on May 23, 2019, the schools’ management said it is considering each act of the student as a “Level III” type of offense under the PSHS System Student Code of Conduct but the board only considered it all as one “Level III” offense.
Committing a single “Level III” type of offense does not automatically bar one from graduation, based on the school’s code. A student can only be ineligible if he or she commits more than one “Level III” offense.
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A PSHS teacher shared the committee’s statement on social media, stating that it “found sufficient grounds to recommend at least two counts of Level III violations” for each of the six student scholars.
“One count of Level III for each instance a female scholar’s picture is passed from one male scholar to another,” the statement reads.
“Each of these 6 male scholars was involved in varying number of violations ranging from 2 counts to 4 counts of Level III, 2 being the minimum number of Level III violations that would lead to non-graduation,” it added.
While the committee said that it recognized the board’s decision to treat all acts of the male students as a singular “Level III” type of offense, it stood by its belief that each of the students had committed “at least two Level III violations.”
Latest reports indicate that the board already opened the matter for reconsideration following protests from the PSHS-Main Campus Executive Parents Teachers Council.
Students of the premier state secondary school are slated to graduate on May 29, 2019.
The scandal
Undersecretary Lorraine Badoy of the Presidential Communications and Operations Office previously shared in a Facebook post that this year’s graduation rites of PSHS would be “marred with scandal and such grievous injustices.”
The scandal involved male students of the school who shared naked pictures of their ex-girlfriends among themselves and on the internet without the girls’ consent.
According to her, the school’s board allowed the “delinquents” to graduate “with a mere slap on the wrist.”
“For showing naked photos of girls who had the bad sense of trusting such untrustworthy human beings and then sharing it among themselves and then throwing it in cyberspace—where low lives like them will feast on these images—for doing all these, Philippine Science is rewarding them with a diploma from the country’s top science high school,” she lamented.
Women’s party-list Gabriela opened its line to the victims after finding out about the controversy.
Rep. Arlene Brosas called it a case of “cyber pornography” and denounced the state high school for not attending to the victims’ complaints properly.
“Malinaw dito hindi tinugunan ng kanilang (Philippine Science High School) authority ‘yung reklamo ng mga estudyante na cyber pornography. Uploaded ata pati ‘yung chat ng mga kalalakihan, ‘yung boys. Doon kumalat,” she said in an interview.