Sunday, July 29, 2007 Gov’t to hire 13T gov’t personnel next year
BUDGET Secretary Rolando Andaya Jr. said at least 10,000 new public school teachers, 3,000 new policemen, and 500 new jail officers would be hired in 2008.
Andaya said P1 billion of the proposed P1.227 trillion budget for next year, would go to the salaries of the new teachers while P588 million would be allotted for the salaries, training and equipment of the new Police Officers 1 (PO1s) and P95 million for the new Jail Officers 1 (JO1s).
He said the additional positions aim to address the rise in both the student and general population in 2008.
Andaya said the P1 billion fund, which is included in the P145 billion proposed Department of Education (DepEd) budget, would cover the seven month’ salary of the new teachers or from June to December, which covers the first seven months of the 2008-2009 school year.
The 10,000 new teaching positions would bring the number of public school teachers to about 525,150 by next year which is expected to teach an estimated 18 million public school students in the school year 2008-2009.
Andaya, meanwhile, said the hiring of the new policemen would augment the current PNP force of 122,893 cops to 125,893 by next year.
He said the hiring of the Police Officers 1, is part of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s directive to augment the PNP by 15,000 over five years. The program started 2006.
He said 20 percent or about 600 of the new hires will be women who would mostly be handling the crimes against children and women.
There will be 1.774 million additional Filipinos next year. So if we need one cop for every 500 persons, then we need about 3,500 new policemen a year,” he said noting that the current population stands at 88.71 million by year end. He said they are expecting the population to go up to 90.48 million or by two percent by end of 2008.
He said the government would also be hiring additional jail guards for deployment to the 426 Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP)-run facilities.
Andaya said the new BJMP personnel would be separate from the personnel employed by the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor), which operates seven larger prisons.
He said combined, the BJMP and the Bucor, has a total budget of P4.3 billion and oversees a total of some 111,076 prisoners. (JMR/Sunnex)
