Sara Hopes For Mandatory ROTC In Legislative Agenda

Vice president-elect and incoming education secretary Sara Duterte is hopeful that the next Congress will consider bills that will make the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) mandatory for students.

“The executive and legislative agenda will be decided between the president and Congress. I hope that it will be included since there are a lot of pending bills in Congress with regard to that,” she said on Thursday, June 23, in a mix of English and Filipino.

“(The bills) have different names, different titles, so I hope it will be included (in the legislative agenda of the incoming administration),” she added.

During the campaign, Duterte said she wants to make military service mandatory for Filipinos aged 18 years old. The proposal, she said at the time, would be different from the ROTC program currently taken voluntarily by college students.

In an interview last week, Duterte said the matter of mandatory ROTC is better discussed in the higher education level, noting that the Department of Education only has jurisdiction over basic education.

In 2019, the House of Representatives approved on third and final reading a proposed bill that would institutionalize ROTC in Grades 11 and 12 but its counterpart measure in the Senate was not approved. Several versions of the same bill were filed in the present Congress, but these remained pending at the committee level.

For their part, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers urged Duterte to focus on pressing challenges in the education sector, including the learning crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pan-demic.

“What we need is a leadership that recognizes the learning crisis, the desperate quality of education, the chronically underpaid status of teachers, and the degeneration of the country’s sense of history and grasp of truth,” ACT secretary general Raymond Basilio said.

Dialogue

The Teachers’ Dignity Coalition (TDC) is seeking a dialogue with Duterte to discuss their call for a substantial salary increase for teachers.

“What we ask is beyond increase in our salaries, it’s about rectifying the decades-old mistake of the government. While we appreciate the previous salary adjustments under the salary standardization laws (SSL), we could not help but express our frustration for the very small amount of salary increases which are divided in several tranches, a tradition under the SSL scheme,” TDC national chairperson Benjo Basas said.

Basas cited the 1966 Magna Carta for Public School Teachers, which stated teachers’ salaries “shall compare favorably with those paid in other occupations requiring equivalent or similar qualifications, training and abilities.” But he noted that their pay is still pegged in low bracket under the SSL, unlike other government personnel that have their own salary schemes.

“We always hear that ‘teaching is the noblest of professions’, but our salaries remain among the lowest among all professionals in the government,” he added in Filipino.

Duterte responded to teachers’ calls for salary hike during a press conference in Davao City on Monday, June 20.