Continuous learning when ‘walang pasok’
We should never gamble with children’s safety, but neither should we quietly allow their education to disappear one suspended school day at a time.
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We should never gamble with children’s safety, but neither should we quietly allow their education to disappear one suspended school day at a time.
As a parent, whenever a “walang pasok” announcement is made, I am glad my young children and their teachers will not be exposed to floods or severe weather. However, at the same time, I worry about what they will be doing that day, whether meaningful lessons will continue, or whether another suspended day will be added to the learning they must somehow recover later.
That concern is supported by troubling evidence. DepEd reported that some schools had between 20 and 40 suspensions from 8 June to 31 August this year, while EDCOM 2 estimated that 53 teaching days were lost during School Year 2023–2024 because of calamities, local holidays and non-teaching activities. Forty days are more than one-fifth of a 180-day school year, while 53 days are roughly equivalent to an entire academic quarter.
The issue cannot be resolved by keeping schools open regardless of conditions. The safety of students, teachers and school personnel must remain paramount, and that duty extends beyond the school gates. A dry campus is not necessarily accessible when roads are flooded, public transportation is disrupted and the journey may take two to four hours, leaving everyone exhausted without producing meaningful classroom instruction.
Education Secretary Sonny Angara correctly warned that unnecessary closures have cost learners their potential, while explaining that DepEd is “not merely suspending classes” but “safeguarding learning continuity.” Its proposed framework would combine automatic suspensions under technical thresholds, localized decisions by local governments and school-level decisions based on documented conditions. This is a sound policy direction, provided that discretion is governed by clear standards and considers campuses, access routes, transportation and actual conditions in affected communities.
The same safety rules should bind public and private schools, although the means of continuing instruction need not be identical. A school with reliable digital facilities may shift online, while another may require printed materials, adjusted schedules or recovery sessions. Parents must receive timely explanations, and children should not be penalized when conditions near their homes remain dangerous despite the reopening of their school.
The legal and policy test should be whether lost learning is actually recovered, not merely whether an alternative activity was assigned. Government should measure instructional days delivered, teacher-contact hours restored and student proficiency after prolonged disruptions. This matters because the Philippines placed 77th among 81 participants in PISA 2022, which is a test to determine reading proficiency, while only 16 percent of Filipino students reached minimum proficiency in Mathematics, 24 percent in Reading and 23 percent in Science.
Congress must provide funding for resilient classrooms, emergency connectivity, printed materials and credible learning-recovery programs. A “walang pasok” declaration should protect the entire school community, but it should also trigger a definite plan for continuing or recovering instruction. We should never gamble with children’s safety, but neither should we quietly allow their education to disappear one suspended school day at a time.
For comments, email him at darren.dejesus@gmail.com.
