ARE OUR schools safe?
By safe, we mean school buildings should be structurally sound and built on safe ground. We do not want a strong temblor killing hundreds of children studying inside their classrooms, or a whole mountain of mud instantly burying children alive, or rising floodwaters drowning them, or extremely high temperatures burning them.
Let us make our schools disaster-resilient, and it starts with assessing the safety of schools in our respective communities.
In 2013, when super typhoon “Yolanda” made landfall, even some evacuation centers were reached by the storm surge, instantly killing hundreds of individuals who thought they had already sought refuge. “Yolanda” damaged more than 3,000 schools, aside from other infrastructure, in the affected regions. In 2006, 246 schoolchildren were among the more than 1,000 casualties in a landslide that followed several days of heavy rains in Barangay Guinsaugon, St. Bernard, Southern Leyte.
It is estimated that annually, disasters affect 66.5 million children worldwide; and because children are among the most vulnerable to disasters, it is important that not only do we keep our children out of harm’s way, but also we make them part of building resilient communities.
Learning institutions and the youth should be directly involved in efforts to make communities safe from disasters. Children should witness and practice disaster risk reduction early on in life. If we inculcate in our children a level of disaster preparedness, this will be passed on to the succeeding generations when they become adults.
We need safe schools; we need schoolchildren who are knowledgeable and informed about disaster risk reduction. In making our nation disaster-resilient, we not only protect our young people, but also invest in our country’s future.
