Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte on Monday, March 27, claimed that the recent call of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) for the Department of Education (DepEd) to hire 30,000 additional teachers per year to resolve the problematic teacher-student ratio was just a tactic to “divert” the public’s attention from the violence in Masbate. The official accused ACT of remaining “silent” about the clash between the military and the New People’s Army (NPA) in Masbate that led to the cancellation of face-to-face classes in several towns there. “ACT Teachers, while silent about the NPA operations, apparently needed to come up with something outrageous to divert the public's attention away from the damage that the NPA attacks caused to our Masbate learners,” she said in a statement. Duterte described the call by ACT to hire 30,000 public school teachers yearly until 2028, and to allocate a budget of P100 billion per year for classrooms as “obviously deceptive maneuvers” allegedly designed “to counter the Marcos administration’s solution to the problems hounding the education sector.” She pointed out that ACT has yet to call out the “NPA-initiated violence” in six towns of Masbate that has so far affected over 55,199 learners and 2,815 school personnel. The Vice President disclosed that DepEd was already planning to continue hiring additional teaching and non-teaching personnel this year. It will also be deploying “more administrative officers in schools to complement its workforce and ultimately reduce the administrative tasks of teachers,” she added. Duterte assured that the agency will look into using currently available technology to address the challenges faced by the education sector instead of solely focusing on archaic and ineffective solutions. “These form part of the reforms that we will implement to ensure the effective delivery of basic education to Filipino learners and champion teachers' welfare,” she said. “The Marcos administration will not be pressured, hoodwinked, or distracted by groups like ACT Teachers,” Duterte added.