Teachers must be fully vaccinated to teach in pilot face-to-face classes, the departments of Health and Education said Monday.
“We agreed that all school personnel—teachers and non-teaching—should be fully vaccinated when they participate in the pilot face-to-face [classes],” said planning service director Roger Masapol of the Department of Education (DepEd) in an online press conference.
Masapol said teachers must also be below 65 years old and have no comorbidities.
In a statement, Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said while vaccination is not mandatory, classroom learning will be limited to vaccinated teaching personnel.
“So as not to disenfranchise unvaccinated teachers, they may teach using distance or online modules. This also presents options for parents who are still hesitant to send their children to school,” Duque said.
The DOH said it would accelerate the vaccine rollout covering both public and private school teachers and non-teaching personnel.
The pilot implementation will involve a maximum of 100 public schools and 20 private schools across the country. Participation in the two-month program is voluntary.
Under guidelines approved by the Department of Health and DepEd, the class size will be a maximum of 12 learners for Kindergarten, 16 learners for Grades 1 to 3, 20 learners for senior high school, and 12 learners for senior high school in technical-vocational livelihood workshops or science laboratories.
The pilot will feature a combined implementation of face-to-face classes and distance learning.
The government has ordered that COVID-19 vaccination for teachers and school personnel be stepped up, as the country prepares to hold a pilot study of limited in-person classes in select schools, the DOH said.
In an online press briefing, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said teachers and school personnel who would take part in the pilot implementation are now required to get inoculated against the respiratory illness.
Education Secretary Leonor Briones had said COVID-19 vaccination was not a requirement for participating school personnel but Vergeire said the policy was overturned following consultations with child health experts.
“This was agreed on by the Department of Education and the Department of Health that indeed, vaccination should be there to ensure the safety of our children,” Vergeire said. Full story on manilastandard.net.
“The government’s vaccine cluster was already informed of the new policy and vaccine czar Secretary Carlito Galvez gave his support on this vaccination,” Vergeire said.
Vergeire said the National COVID-19 Vaccination Operations Center already issued an order to speed up the inoculation of all unvaccinated public and private school teachers and non-teaching personnel.
The DOH has yet to recommend COVID-19 vaccination for school-age children.
During the school opening program last September 13, Education Undersecretary Alain Pascua said about 40 percent of the DepEd’s nearly 1 million workforce was already vaccinated against COVID-19, based on reports from field offices.
Under the guidelines of the pilot implementation, schools are asked to coordinate with their respective local government units or private pediatricians “to complete routine infant vaccines” for students attending in-person classes.
The DepEd has yet to set a date for the dry run’s start as it continued to assess possible participating schools.
Also on Monday, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Philippines pressed the DepEd to immediately address its outstanding fund transfer to the Procurement Service of the Department of Budget and Management (PS-DBM) amounting to P6.65 billion. Of this amount, P5.53 billion was to be spent on learning materials including computer hardware and software as well as textbooks and other learning materials.
None of this has materialized, however, the group said.
“Our teachers and students have had to scavenge for distance learning materials such as laptops, printers, and modules just to make it through an entire school year, and they were told again and again that there aren’t enough funds. This is clearly a lie. We’ve even had to shell out money from our own shallow pockets! How could they have let direly needed funds be left idle? Where is the urgency from this government to provide support to our teachers and students?” said Raymond Basilio, ACT secretary general.
With the unspent funds parked with PS-DBM, the government could have procured 221,200 laptops at P25,000 each.
ACT said its data showed that only 7 percent of teachers from the National Capital Region and 14 percent from other regions have received their DepEd-issued laptops. Almost 700,000 teachers have yet to be provided with laptops, the group added.
