THE APPROVAL of having pilot limited face-to-face classes in areas where there is minimal risk of COVID-19 is a welcome development. After more than a year of school closures, quality and access to education for every Filipino youth has been sacrificed. We need to start somewhere, sometime.
The Department of Education must now ensure that those schools where face-to-face classes would happen would have adequate facilities and health protocols in place. The government must support our schools, provide adequate funds to protect students, teachers and education support personnel, and ensure they will not be abandoned.
Teachers should be adequately supported with gadgets, internet allowances and just compensation for the service they render. Also, the youth should have access to gadget support and data allowances, especially the poorest of the poor.
The longer the government keeps schools closed and continues to deny adequate funding to support the blended distance learning that the poorest youth can access without compromising quality education, learning loss among students only continues to worsen. Another year of modules for students without adequate guidance from their teachers will be another wasted year for the students, teachers and parents. It would also mean another year of overworked, undersupported and underpaid dedicated teachers. They are still demanding for the deserved overtime pay and service credit earned in the 13-month long pandemic school year, they demand adequate support for gadgets and P1,500 internet allowances to support the blended distance learning, they continue to struggle for a substantial salary increase, yet the Department of Education continue to play blind and deaf every time teachers voice out their demands for adequate support, just compensation and respect for the rights, benefits and welfare.
We will continue to monitor the guidelines and policies of the Department of Education on how it will implement the pilot limited face-to-face classes, and urge the government to ensure that our schools and our teachers have adequate support so that access to quality education can continue amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and that adequate budget will be included for health protocols, protection and facilities in all our schools, not just the pilot schools for face-to-face classes.
