Teachers asks help of DBM to address distance learning, benefits funding problem

Teachers resorted to the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) for aid as they asked for its help to address the insufficient state subsidy of the government’s distance learning program as well as employees of the Department of Education (DepEd) being deprived of their benefits due to slow release of funds.

In a letter written by The Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Secretary General Raymond Basilio addressed to Budget Secretary Wendel E. Avisado, Basilio urges the need to adopt a “supplementary budget to education” as an amount of the 2021 education budget has been cut. 

Initially, ACT said that the DBM in the 2021 National Expenditures Program proposed a P568 billion budget for the DepEd for 2021 but was only allotted P556 billion in the government’s approved budget.

The problems that learners and teachers have experienced in the first grading period of the school year and the waning crisis in education were caused by “poorly-funded and ill-equipped” distance learning program, the group emphasized.

ACT Secretary-General Raymond Basilio relates that the government is failing in supporting and funding quality education to students and teachers amid the pandemic which goes against the Constitution that mandates a grant of the highest budgetary allocation to education for the purpose of ensuring the delivery of accessible and quality education to the youth.

We turn to DBM to once and for all resolve the funding problems for the grant of benefits to teachers and education support personnel, which have been weighing heavily on our education workers’ economic state and pulling down on their morale,

Basilio said. 

He added that the teachers’ ‘meager salaries’ can no longer support the burdening expenses of distance learning.

ACT also has stressed that the DBM and President Rodrigo Duterte can easily resolve the problems of lack of funding and legal basis if they would give ‘enough importance’ to education.