DepEd to hire up to 13,000 teachers for coming school year

MANILA, Philippines—The Department of Education announced on Thursday its plan to hire up to 13,000 teachers to partially fill a shortage of some 50,000 teaching staff in the coming school year.

“Based on our 2011 allocations, we are hiring more than 10,000 permanent teachers based on the budget.  Maybe we can include a few thousands more,” Education Secretary Armin Luistro said on Thursday.

“So maybe there will be 13,000 new teachers going into classrooms before June or within the month of June,” Luistro said.

The official made the announcement on the sidelines of an education conference of officials from the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao at the Ateneo Professional Schools in at Rockwell, Makati City.

During the conference, local government officials and regional educational officials set programs to attain education targets in the coming years, particularly preventing dropouts and bringing out-of-school youth back to schooling.

He said some teachers have been waiting in line to enter DepEd’s teaching force while other applications may be pending.

Some 22 million students are expected to troop to public schools when classes resume on June 6.

DepEd is also hiring contractual teachers for the expected increase in kindergarten students by the coming school year.  To date, some one million five-year-olds out of the target 2.4 million kinder-age students have signed up to enroll in public kindergarten by June.