A TOP education official in Leyte province expressed alarm on Thursday, July 19, over the mental and professional qualifications of public school teachers following the case of 21-year-old multi-grade teacher Emylou Malate, who killed herself inside their house on July 12, less than a month from her first day of service on June 25.
Malate, one of the two newly-hired teachers assigned to an upland primary school in Bagacay village, some five kilometers away from the town proper of La Paz, Leyte, was believed to have committed suicide due to “depression” as narrated by her 62-year-old father Rodolfo in a local police blotter.
While the police declared that Malate’s case was already “closed” and no foul play happened to her, Leyte Assistant Schools Division Superintendent Edgar Tenasas said they had formed a fact-finding team and conducted inquiry into the “sad” incident to shed light on the issue whether the teacher’s death was job-related.
The inquiry was also in response to a viral Facebook post that seeks “justice” to the death of Malate, who belonged to batch 2017 graduates of Leyte Normal University, a top learning institution for the teaching profession in Eastern Visayas based in Tacloban City.
The post claimed that Malate’s teaching load, paper works, work pressure, professional relationship, and working environment, among other various issues besetting the country’s public education system since its inception, became the “major factor” of the suicide incident.
In his media interviews, Tenasas said he respected the airing out of views by the anonymous Facebook poster whom they have already identified but did not disclose it to the public.
According to Tenasas, he personally asked Malate’s co-teacher and close friend Desiree Abordo and their school principal Diomedes Tejome to respond to the “bullying” allegations and both of them denied such statement.