TEACHERS nowadays are saddled with non-teaching duties thereby reducing their contact hours to teaching depriving the learners with supposed less class size and one’s teaching according to their major subjects.
With this, the Department of Education (DepEd) through Secretary Leonor Magtolis Briones is in continuous talks with the concerned national agencies particularly the Civil Service Commission (CSC) and the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) to grant the needs for more non-teaching staff and guidance counselors.
In a meeting with the House of Representative Committee of Basic Education and Culture headed by Cong. Roman Romulo, the Secretary reported that the DBM is favorably considering the request of DepEd for the adding of non-teaching items to its overall budget.
For this year alone DepEd was allocated with additional 5,000 non-teaching items and the Department is hoping that more slots for administrative or technical jobs will be given to the 47,000 public schools that the Department is managing.
To further reduce the bulk of the clerical works of the teachers, DepEd has also reduced the number of school forms needed to be filled out by teachers to 10 from the previous 36 forms after implementing simplified school forms, standardization of format, and updating and reduction of data needed in existing forms.
With the recurring nationwide problem of resolving the hiring of guidance counselors, Sec. Briones has an ongoing talks with the DBM and CSC to ease up minimum requirements to attract more guidance counselors in the public school system.
To solve it the DepEd Chief is proposing to lower the requirements for guidance counselors and is up for consideration of DBM and CSC because at this time with Generation Z and the challenges which our learners are facing from society and global developments, guidance counselors are really needed.
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In related development, as part of the ongoing K to 12 curriculum review, DepEd will conduct a nationwide conference of education practitioners and experts on March 25, 2020 to tackle improvements of the curriculum, including the implementation of Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE).
The Secretary reported to the same committee in congress that one of the agenda of the conference is to review and update the MTB-MLE transition program including the learning process of the learners.
As part of Republic Act No. 10533 or the Enhanced Basic Education Act directs DepEd to adhere to the principles and framework of MTB-MLE in its curriculum development thus Kindergarten and Grades 1 to 3 learners are required to receive instruction, teaching materials, and assessment in their respective regional or native language.
The current Undersecretary for Curriculum and Instructions Diosdado San Antonio uttered that DepEd is bent in continuing the implementation of the MTB-MLE despite meeting some early hitches in its implementation.
To date, Usec. San Antonio said that the Department already produced teaching and learning resources for 19 languages of the Philippines, which covered almost 80% of the learners’ population, and are focused to develop resources for indigenous peoples (IPs) languages.
San Antonio is hoping that this year, DepEd will be able to do at least 20 IP languages and the roadmap by 2027, all of the estimated 180 IP languages will have their own learning resources for MTB-MLE.
This Corner hopes that all reforms being done in the curriculum and human resources will redound to the attainment of quality education we have been aspiring numerous decades before.