IN CASE you haven’t noticed, our teachers haven’t had the chance to breathe since classes officially ended on July 10 as they had to organize graduation programs and submit their final grades, then they were tasked to work on their performance evaluation, tons of paperwork and meetings, and enrollment duties. By Aug. 3, they were tasked to start soliciting for the needs of the next school year through the Brigada Eskwela program.
The Department of Education (DepEd) is requiring teachers to render continuous service even if classes have ended, denying them their rightful and much-needed rest. It is forcing teachers to overtime work yet again when it has not even compensated three months of teachers’ overtime rendered in the recently closed school year. This is inhumane. Abusive. Exploitative.
DepEd and the Civil Service Commission (CSC) have long been requested to provide teachers with 25% overtime (OT) pay and service credits for the 77 days in excess of the 220 maximum number of school days allowed by the law. Nearly a month has passed since school ended yet teachers have not received their overdue compensation for OT work for school year 2020–2021. Goodness gracious, pay up and let teachers have their vacation! Give them a chance to recuperate from last school year which almost, if not already, burned out so many.
Worse, there’s a new push for teachers to solicit from parents and the private sector the needs for the upcoming school year through the Brigada Eskwela, such as reams of paper, ink, health supplies, and the like. Brigada Eskwela is good. But it should stop passing onto teachers, parents, private stakeholders, and local government units the responsibilities of the national government to provide the needs of education.
It’s almost insulting to force teachers and other stakeholders to engage in another bayanihan for education continuity when the very government mandated to provide the needs of the sector abandoned its duties. Not to mention that the stakeholders it’s counting on for Brigada Eskwela were the ones badly hit by the unabated health and economic crises and also the ones who filled in the gaps left by direly lacking support from the national government. Teachers cannot, in good conscience, ask stakeholders to shell out more when they can hardly survive these crises.
With the effects of the pandemic and worsening economic situation, the national government should in fact increase support for essential services, not further the difficulties faced by people on the ground.
