THE Brigada Eskwela is supposed to be a showcase of collaboration for the Department of Education (DepEd) before the school year starts. Teachers and staff join hands in sprucing up classrooms, making minor repairs and fixing everything they can before hordes of students descend on the school.
But teachers are now spending for what should be a government project. Before the school year 2026-2027 began on June 8, Marie Yzsa Madula said she spent more than P13,500 during Brigada Eskwela, including the repair of the rest room, roof and repainting of the classroom.
“I have been in the service for 14 years but I have never received even one liter of paint from DepEd,” Madula said. Another teacher, Mean Cerda, said she spent at least P3,000 to prepare her classroom during the DepEd’s weeklong National Schools Maintenance Week that ended last Friday. The teachers are not given a Brigada Eskwela allowance.
An entry-level teacher earns P31,705. With government deductions of P5,000, the net take-home pay drops to a little over P26,000. If teachers spend P5,000 for Brigada Eskwela, this is equivalent to 19 percent of their monthly salary.
An Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) survey revealed that teachers continue to bear the burden of school expenses and unpaid additional work despite repeated government assurances that their workload would be reduced. The teachers’ group said that 75 percent of teachers reported spending their own money for Brigada Eskwela.
A teacher of six years, Richell Cindy said she is tired of paying for broken chairs and broken tables, and other things like an electric fan in her classroom. “Based on our experience, after less than three months, the chairs are damaged and it’s illegal to compel the students who broke it to shoulder the expenses,” she said.
The Brigada Eskwela guidelines state that teachers may earn one day of service credit for every eight hours of service, up to five days of service credits. However, teacher Rodrick Alfred Dorol said he had received none of this.
“They will encourage you to clean and complete the weeklong Brigada. But when you submit your daily time record and complete documents to the division, they won’t approve it and won’t even explain why,” Dorol said.
Teachers do unpaid work
At least 74 percent of teachers who served as tutors under the Academic Recovery and Accessible Learning (ARAL) program said they received neither overtime pay nor transportation allowance. ACT chairman Ruby Bernardo said the findings exposed the widening gap between official pronouncements and the actual conditions teachers face on the ground.
“It is clear from the survey results that DepEd has failed in its promise not to burden teachers with the ARAL program. The P8.9 billion that has been allocated for the program has not been realized because teachers who performed additional work during the vacation period were not paid. They were forced to spend and provide reading materials for the children,” Bernardo said.
Teachers’ groups announced their readiness for the start of the school year this week. But they are also reminding the government of their appeal for an increase of P15,000 in their monthly pay.
Such amounts make it an outrage to see senators not reporting for work, with one of them absent for seven months now, but still getting his full pay and perks.
Sen. Ronald dela Rosa, on the run since last November amid an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, continues to receive his basic pay of P300,000 a month plus allowances as well as P1.5 million in maintenance and operating expenses for his Senate office. His office is filled with 10 of his relatives, all of them on the public payroll. As a former four-star police general, he also gets a monthly pension of P300,000.
Or you have the phenomenon of two sets of senators squabbling, not crafting the laws that they are mandated to do in the first place.
Meanwhile, public school teachers, mostly overworked and underpaid, must settle for a fraction of the senators’ salaries for their net earnings. The teachers’ pay scales follow salary grades in the bureaucracy. But they incur additional expenses related to their work, which the government can address.
If the government cannot provide the higher pay demanded by the teachers, it should at least address the funding requirements to create a school environment conducive to learning.
