SENDING our children to schools while the nation is on a state of a national health emergency is tantamount to feeding our young ones to the lion’s mouth. It is serious wrongdoing orchestrated by no less than the Department of Education (DepEd) where we all ought to trust our children for virtuous learning.
Why DepEd cannot wait until a Covid-19 vaccine is available to safeguard the innocent children from this fatal disease? Will this administration permit a massive death among the most vulnerable minors?
The heartless executives of the education department prospered in their presentation of the Learning Continuity Plan (LCP) to the National Inter-Agency Task Force (NIATF).
Without rigor, the plan was approved. And so, for this school year, classes will start on August 24, 2020 with or without vaccine; and will end on April 30, 2021.
DepEd is deafened from the shared uproar of the ever-loving parents who are willing to wait in abeyance of class opening until the prescribed protection of their children is available.
In the LCP, DepEd assured that a system for distant or blended learning modules is readied. But the astute officials failed to come up with a science-based study on three crucial factors for effective learning under the new norm.
First is the preparedness of the learning facilitators or teachers. To determine how prepared the teachers are, a survey was conducted on April 16 to 30, 2020. Out of 689,329 teacher-respondents, DepEd said only 77,631 or 11 percent of them do not have a computer at home.
The survey could not be a strong determinant of being ready because those computers are being used for whatever business by all family members of a teacher-respondent and not dedicated for the distant teaching-learning.
It is a responsibility of the state to provide a government-issued computer for that purpose.
To effectively carry out what is written in the LCP, the department needs of at least P27 billion to provide one laptop per teacher. And these laptops must be distributed to about 800,000 public school teachers before August.
Second is the readiness of the learners with their gadgets. DepEd did not conduct a study on what percentage of enrollees in public schools owned personal computers/laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Most of them enrolled in public schools in confidence that education is free; and buying those gadgets is only secondary to food and other necessities.
And third is the capability of the infrastructure to convey the information from the facilitators to the learners and the response. DepEd failed to understand that internet signals are even lagging in the urban, how much more to those in the rural and hinterlands?
Again, in the blended system with the aid of technology, DepEd has no concrete study of what percentage from 800,000 teachers are in the age bracket of 23 to 35 being identified as a techie or digitally skilled? What percentage of this number belongs to the age bracket 36 to 46 being not so techie? And, what percentage from this number belongs to the age bracket of 47 to 60 who are generally on “refuse to learn” generation about the advancement of technology? Will those laptops be useful?
I smell another fiction why DepEd compel the distant or even blended learning even with the unavailability of resources.