Roperos: Protecting our schools

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

WELL, I think it is time our school authorities begin pressuring the government to set a risk prevention or protection system for our schools, or more tacitly, for our children during the times they are in their schools. Teachers, who are supposed to their surrogate parents while they are attending school, should be so trained on how to avoid risks in times of calamities.

During calamitous weather circumstances when rivers overflow their banks and houses and buildings are carried away by the current, millions of properties are lost or destroyed. And suddenly, it occurred to our people that they have to join the efforts to defend the sanctity and safety of our school.

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During the typhoons that hit the Philippines over the past many months, with Sendong being the latest, our national leaders finally realized the risks and dangers that our schools have been exposed to and are thus trying “to raise awareness on disaster risk reduction among school administrators, teachers, and children in Central Visayas.”

I recall that early on, our government left the matter of risk-avoidance and safety during natural calamities all to the will of God. In the late ‘40s, there was a shortage of public school teachers. As a member of the second batch of graduates of the newly opened University of the Philippines high school in Lahug, I was enticed to take a public elementary school teachers’ exam since I did not have money to enroll in college.

As luck may have it, I passed, and was assigned to teach English and Elementary Science in grades five and six in Asturias central school, about seven kilometers away from our town, Balamban. My principal was Ramon Dakay, father of Msgr. Achilles Dakay.

Since we were both from Balamban, there were times when we would hike seven kilometers, rain or shine, from Asturias to Balamban due to lack of buses.

I remember that during bad weather, we would have to wait for hours for the flood of the then still bridgeless Combado river to subside. Mr. Dakay was already in his fifties then, while I was only 19 years old. Needless to say that among my grade six pupils was Christian Noel who, the last time I heard, has become a bishop assigned in Talibon, Bohol.

Since that time to this date, I think the number of schools and the school population in our town, and in the whole country as well, has grown, perhaps, more than twenty times. Many storms and typhoons have come and gone, many buildings have been carried away by the floods, hundreds of lives have been lost, and thousands of personal tragedies have been shouldered by our people in silence.

Truth to tell, I think it is time to do something about it. The next move should be that of our government’s leaders, and please, no politics.