The Teachers' Dignity Coalition (TDC) is understandably concerned about the danger faced by the nation’s teachers when the school year begins on Monday, October 5.
“Almost a million teachers who are in charge of serving 24 million learners will be forced to physically interact with parents and other stakeholders at some levels and this is a health and safety nightmare that brings chills to the spines of the sane because people would take public transportation vehicles, move thousands of modules back and forth, and at some point will have to do face-to-face meetings as online infrastructures prove frighteningly inadequate,” TDC National Chairman Benjo Basa said.
The emergency in the country due to the COVID-19 pandemic has been extended by the President for another year, he said, but the security and safety of teachers and learners are yet to be properly addressed.
Basas summarized the organization’s concerns as the nation moves close to the opening of the school year three days from today. The modules he spoke of are printed materials which are supposed to be given to each student in his/her home at the start of the school year, then gathered for assessment by the teacher. This is a process with unimaginable complications and danger to the health and safety of the teachers.
And this is only one of the problems in the proposed system. Aside from the printed modules, the classes are supposed to include radio, television, and Internet sessions. Out there in the provinces, how many among the nation’s 24 million learners have the tablets and other technical facilities? And how many homes and areas have lnternet service?
The TDC was naturally concerned about the danger to the health of the teachers in distributing and later gathering the printed modules. But it also pointed out the other problems in its “Notes and Recommendations from Teachers on the Resumption of Classes for School Year 2020-2021.”
It may be too late to make any substantial changes in the plans of the Department of Education (DepEd), especially since the opening of the school year has already been postponed twice – from the original June to August 24, then to October 5. The TDA is for moving the opening to January next year.
But it asked DepEd officials to see for themselves the situation in the provinces and perhaps adopt some measures to ease the situation, especially the danger to the health and safety of teachers in traveling over wide areas to the homes of their students.