Needed: More non-teaching personnel at public schools

A Makabayan solon is prodding the Duterte administration to hire ample regular non-teaching personnel at public schools in order to ease the long-running "calvary" of overworked and underpaid teachers who are heavily burdened by clerical, administrative and other nonteaching tasks.

ACT Teachers Party-List Rep. France Castro made the appeal to President Duterte on Holy Wednesday, March 28 which just happens to coincide with the tail end of school year 2017-18.

"This is the season when teachers are required to submit mountains of forms right after they have prepared for the fourth grading period examination, checked the test papers and manually encoded the grades. All these should be accomplished while they prepare for the school recognition and graduation rites," Castro said.

According to her, public school teachers have long suffered the burden of completing such paperwork since, unlike private schools and colleges, public elementary and high schools are not provided with enough staff who are clerks, registrars, and other necessary nonteaching personnel.

"This administration should look into the sad plight of our teachers who work like carabaos just to comply with the Department of Education's (DepEd) protocol in the preparation and evaluation of school forms conducted at the end of every school year as stated in Deped Order 11, 2018 amid technical difficulties and the government's lack of technical support like gadgets and internet connection," the lady solon said.

Castro noted that last year, there were 687,229 teaching personnel, 10,917 non-teaching personnel and 27,367 administrative and support staff hired by DepEd nationwide.

"This means that there is just one staff to support 18 teachers in all the operations of the school. From my consultations in Metro Manila, it was reported that two to three teachers work in place of guidance counselors and clerks to serve 2,500 to 2,800 students on top of their teaching loads."

But Castro said that public school teachers aren't overworked during March and April only.

"Teachers' hardships or their 'kalbaryo' (calvary) caused by all sorts of jobs from clerical to administrative tasks haunt them all year round," she said.

"Before the school year opens, the teachers are the leaders and even the main workforce of the yearly Brigada Eskwela where they repair dilapidated chairs and paint their rooms. They even shell out from their own pockets just to compensate for the lack of school maintenance and operating funds," Castro explained.

"The joke that teaching is the mother of all professions is a menacing reality to teachers who have no choice but to perform the tasks of nurses, social workers and other professionals to serve our youth as they conduct deworming and vaccination procedures to their students, administer feeding programs and other responsibilities that are supposed to be borne by non-teaching personnel which the government have so long deprived our public schools.

"Teachers are even required to do tasks which are not even supposed to be asked of school personnel such as gathering data for census," she further said.

The leftist solon bared that the problem even worsened with the implementation of the K to 12 program which left schools with almost no instructional materials, requiring teachers to rely on their own research online while handling class sizes up to 80 students per room and even multi-grade shifts.

"We call on the DepEd and DBM (Department of Budget and Management) secretaries to ensure that the creation of enough regular non-teaching items will be included in the upcoming 2019 national budget. Ultimately, we seek the immediate passage of our House Bill 7211 to increase the entry-level salary of public school teachers to P30,000," Castro concluded.