SO, THE Department of Education is hiring “learner support aides” or para-teachers.
Why not instead hire real teachers with their own teaching loads to enable either the lowering to five the teaching load rather than the current six, or the reduction of class size to 40 instead of 50?
DepEd can certainly tap retrenched private school teachers as priority (many already have years of experience in the teaching profession), then college graduates with a degree in education.
The shift to remote learning and the lack of ample state support for such has more than doubled the workload — not to mention the expenses — of already overworked public school teachers. This will likely result in the further decline of education quality and burn out among our educators.
Every class of about 50-60 students has as much parents who are all assisted by and regularly in contact with teachers; add to that how each class employs various modalities with materials adapted for such, compelling them to orient all stakeholders on how to go about these modes. Given these, we’ll need additional personnel to take on teaching loads to reduce teaching time to five hours, or to redistribute students to classes of only 40. This will bring significant relief from the strains caused by the demands of education delivery amid the pandemic.
Under the Magna Carta for Public School Teachers, teachers must have a maximum of six teaching hours while the remaining two should be used for other teaching-related tasks. And as teaching takes on a different, more complicated form under blended learning, can DepEd not rigidly impose the maximum, especially in light of shortages in state input?
Presently, DepEd has yet to fill 34,000 teaching positions and continues to request for 70,000 more. The Alliance of Concerned Teachers asserted that it will be beneficial to all involved if the additional teaching personnel who will be hired for this school year will be prioritized in the filling up of said items.
Also, since we want these personnel to perform teaching tasks, it’s only fair that they be given salaries similar to what other teachers currently receive, unlike DepEd’s proposal to pay para-teachers a measly P6,000–P11,000. This will also give them a head start in public schools that can be their edge for regularization upon meeting the minimum requirements.
