To help ensure the safe 100 percent reopening of schools, the Department of Education (DepEd) was urged to immediately resolve “old normal” problems which have been haunting public schools even before the Covid-19 pandemic.
“How are we going to achieve a better normal education if old problems remain unsolved?” Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Philippines Secretary General Raymond Basilio said in a statement issued Friday, June 3.
ACT called on the DepEd to resolve pre-pandemic issues in the education sector --- especially those that were observed during the initial implementation of limited face-to-class classes in public schools based on the survey conducted by Movement for Safe, Equitable, Quality, and Relevant (SEQuRe) Education.
SEQuRe Education, a network of education experts, teachers, parents, and students, conducted a month-long survey in March among teacher-respondents from 63 out of the 13,692 basic education schools nationwide that have opened for limited face-to-face classes from November 2021 until April 2022.
Citing the result of the said survey, Basilio noted that up to 96 percent of respondents indicated that “students were happy to be back in schools.”
The same survey also showed that at least 96 said that students were “learning better compared to when they were enrolled in purely distance learning modalities.”
Despite this, Basilio said that DepEd and the incoming administration have a “long way to go” if they are to open all the schools for 100 percent face-to-face learning.
In a press briefing early this week, Education Secretary Leonor Briones said that all schools nationwide are encouraged to reopen the conduct of face-to-face classes.
READ:
https://mb.com.ph/2022/05/30/deped-eyes-100-implementation-of-face-to-face-classes-next-school-year/
However, Basilio noted that based on the survey, government funding and support were “insufficient” which compelled 59 to 83 percent of teacher-respondents to “spend out-of-pocket to prepare schools and classrooms for safe reopening, while some important safety measures were still not sufficiently installed.
SEQuRe Education pointed out that families of learners also had difficulties in providing for their children’s distance learning needs amid the persisting economic crisis as observed by 64 to 89 percent of the respondents.
The survey also found that efforts and strategies for the implementation of limited in-classroom learning were “heavily decentralized and school-dependent.”
To ensure the safe reopening of schools, ACT said that the national government and the DepEd Central Office must ensure that the funds for school reopening are significantly raised; mass hiring of teaching and non-teaching personnel; and conducting student assessments nationwide to guide the crafting of an evidence-based evidence-based education recovery program.
Basilio stressed that the resumption of face-to-face classes can only be effective in addressing the learning crisis if “education recovery is designed based on a concrete study of the impacts of the two-year school closure to learning, thus proposing for the conduct of student assessments nationwide.”