THE Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) said Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte is just wasting her mandate with her attacks on them.
ACT Philippines released a statement on March 30 claiming that the Department of Education (DepEd) secretary has not addressed any problems in the education sector since she assumed office eight months ago.
This includes the call of the education sector for a salary increase for teachers, teaching overload pay, additional benefits, building more classrooms, and hiring more teachers.
“Instead, she is wasting her mandate to her mad crusade to attack ACT Philippines and ACT Teachers Partylist, and issuing tyrannical orders meant to stifle the voices of our teachers and interfere with our union work and community service,” ACT said.
This follows after Duterte earlier called ACT Teachers Party-list representative France Castro a “fake” leader for pushing peace negotiations between the government and communist-terrorist groups (CTG) in Masbate that disrupted classes in the area.
On Friday, March 31, Duterte responded that they have reopened schools and restarted on-site, face-to-face classes under her term. She added that they launched DepEd’s Matatag Agenda which aims to hire more teachers and build more classrooms.
“For 12 years, ACT Teachers has been claiming to represent teachers in Congress. Yet our public school personnel continue to face financial woes and we have a generation of learners that are facing several challenges,” Duterte said.
Last month, Duterte and ACT were also involved in a heated exchange wherein the vice president slammed the teachers' group for supporting the week-long strike in the transportation sector.
It was then that Duterte also claimed that ACT supports CTG groups namely the New People’s Army and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines.
In their latest exchange, the vice president maintains her stand about ACT while the group continues to refute the Vice President’s red-tagging.
“ACT Teachers cannot even publicly and explicitly condemn the violence perpetrated by the terrorist group NPA against our learners, our teachers, and other school personnel,” Duterte said. ICM