I Get Lonely Too

I am the Catalyst, the official publication of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines. I was born for the iskolars ng bayan to know everything that happens in the school, even the school administration's wrong doings. That is my orientation, pro-students, pro-masses.

April 2008, is the month I will never forget. On this month, the PUP administration removed the P20 the Catalyst fee from the miscellaneous fees they collect from the students during enrollment. Because of the decision made by the administration, my staff took the responsibility of manually collecting the publication fee from the students every enrollment. Manual collection of the fund is very difficult, for it consumes their time when they could have spent it researching on campus issues and writing articles for the school paper.

Manual collection of the fund resulted to having insufficient funds. Because of this, from the 100% collection, my staff only collected 80%. From the regular 12-pager, I was released with only 8 pages. In October 2010, I became a 4-pager newspaper, bond paper size.

After three years of struggling and propaganda by means of the campaign Defend Our Catalyst, the PUP administration decided to include the payment of the publication fee back to the Student Information System (SIS). I thought that this was the end to what we called rePRESSion.

After that, my staff released two regular monthly issues and two special issues of me, but the funds were not from the funds allocated for my publication but from my staff also. It takes a long time to request funds from the administration which takes several weeks or a month. We now only have one computer in our office, which was bought by the editorial staff in 2007. Because of this rePRESSion, it takes my staff a long time to publish my issues. But I know that the day will come soon when I could see my staff busy preparing articles for me without worrying about the funds they will be using for my release. And with that, I will be very happy.

But these days, I am feeling really sad. Yes, I am sad.