Manila Times - One passes through an alley to enter the gateless Baesa National High School in Caloocan City. The school sits on irregularly shaped land. One building is four stories high on one side, with the concreted rooftop serving as a roofless gymnasium where the students hold their PE classes. They can’t make use of this rooftop when the sun is directly overhead or when it is raining.
On the other side is a building three stories high. The third floor is the school’s multipurpose room that has been divided into three classrooms, with the makeshift stage serving as classroom for one section. There are no laboratories, indicating that science experiments are held inside the classrooms themselves. There are only 20 classrooms to serve 46 sections, and the students are divided into shifts so they can use the classrooms alternately.
Only two toilets with a total of six cubicles serve 3,000 students, the faculty and visitors. One toilet on a lower level was actually transformed into the English Learning Resource Center where remedial classes are now held.
There is hardly any library to speak of. Because there is no longer space for faculty lounges, clinic and the home economics and practical arts laboratory, some classrooms were halved to make room for these amenities.
“This place used to be a garbage dump, being situated beside a cliff. In the 1960s, the Asistio government decided to set up a school here for the barangay, and the school built itself over the decades,” Teacher Benjo Basas described the school from where he himself graduated in the mid-1990s and where he now teaches. He chairs the Teachers’ Dignity Coalition, a group of teachers fighting for better pay and more logistical support to the education sector.
The Caloocan government is now trying to buy some property beside the school to expand and construct more buildings and facilities. It isn’t about to happen. The land is the subject of a legal dispute that has to be settled first before the local government can buy it.
Even with a perceptible lack of facilities vital to learning, Baesa National High School is comparatively more privileged, having several buildings. Many other schools in the Philippines hold classes literally under trees or makeshift huts constructed to keep students away from the sun and rain. Many have no libraries, laboratories, canteens, faculty and student lounges.
The lack of classrooms in public schools is a perennial problem. Since 2000, however, the Department of Education’s classroom building program has steadily increased the number of classrooms, the classroom lack substantially reduced in 2005. The Education department started earning gains in classroom construction starting in 2006.
In 2007, the Education department said it built 14,665 new classrooms and repaired 10,583, exceeding the annual target of 6,000 new classrooms. The department says it met 2007’s target of 1 classroom per 50 students.
As a result, the Education department’s classroom shortage using the assumption of 1 classroom for every 50 students on the double-shift basis, has been substantially addressed.
Some areas, however, continue to experience acute shortages, mainly due to the lack of space for new construction.
Because of this encouraging development, the Education department is now aiming to lower class sizes—from 1:50 on double-shift basis in 2006 to 2007, to 1:45 in 2008. If resources would still warrant, the department desires to bring it further down to 1:40 in 2009 and 1:35 in 2010, but still on double-shift basis.
This year, the Education department says it has an inventory of 421,034 classrooms, with about 10,472 more being constructed as of May. It expressed belief, with enough resources given to it, that it could cut the class size from 45 pupils per class in 2008, to 40 pupils in 2009, and 35 pupils in 2010.
The Education department claims that the rooms it has built fully conformed with contract specifications and within contract time, largely because school principals and field personnel have closely supervised the construction activities.
The department is also seeking an increase in the allocation of its Capital Outlay so it can also spend more in areas that are still suffering from shortages.
The double-shift basis is often not suitable in the rural areas where there are great distances between schools and the students’ and teachers’ communities and few transport facilities to ferry them. Under these circumstances, they are forced to walk several kilometers to and from school.
The great distances between schools and homes, on top of extreme poverty, has been identified as one compelling reason for students to drop out.
With critical targets and deadlines to meet, the Education department has been looking to the private sector for needed financial aid. Private sector support of basic education through the Adopt-a-School Program generated P200 million in 2002, P400 million in 2003 and P4.05 billion in 2007.
The record increase in private sector support in 2007 may be attributed to the re-launch of the program in 2006 by Secretary Jesli Lapus, who himself came from the banking sector.
Some observers are wary of these moves, though. “We should support private sector participation in educating our children, but this should not be taken to mean that the government will transfer to private school its responsibility of educating our children,” said Teacher Basas.
Militant teacher activist Antonio Tinio, of the Alliance for Concerned Teachers, was emphatic. “If the government wants to meet its Millennium Development Goals targets, it should now start to spend on education” as he decried, “It has actually spent more for debt servicing and corruption, rather than educating Filipino kids.”
Uplift of teachers will raise quality of schools
The Department of Education takes up one-third of the entire government bureaucracy. Of its 517,515 employees, 471,837 are teachers. In 2007, the Education department was given the budget for 16,334 new teacher positions, more than double the 7,237 items given in 2006. There are also about 37,000 teachers hired by local governments paid from their own funds.
Teachers are also among the most rebellious government employees. Two days before the start of classes on June 10, militant ones took to the streets for the nth time to demand better pay and more benefits.
The militant Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) gathered in front of the University of Sto. Tomas along España in Manila at 10 a.m., then attempted to march to Mendiola Bridge—the approach to Malacañang Palace—to hold a short program. Hundreds of teachers wore white t-shirts bearing the slogan “Upgrade teachers’ salaries now!”
ACT Chairman Antonio Tinio pointed out that the rally sought to highlight the urgency of raising teachers’ salaries in view of the surge in food, fuel and transport prices.
“Teachers earn P10,933 monthly. After the standard deductions they take home around P8,000. This means that they are now officially among the poor,” remarked Tinio.
“Right now, call-center agents earn very much more than public school teachers. Raising our salaries to the Salary Grade 20 level is necessary to preserve the dignity of the teaching profession and bring it closer to today’s cost of living,” said ACT Secretary-General Francisca Castro.
She added that the 10-percent salary increase to be received by all government employees starting in July wouldn’t provide the needed economic relief for teachers. She noted that the latest data from the National Wages and Productivity Commission show that the living wage for a family of six in NCR as of April 2008 now stands at P871 a day. “That’s P19,162 per month, or P8,229 more than the current salaries of teachers. A mere 10-percent increase will hardly make a dent on that deficit.”
As everyone can see, giving teachers good wages is one reason the government educational systems of Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong work.
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