SAN FERNANDO, Pampanga ? ?Ma'm? sounds sweet and respectful, but to public school teachers Jesusa Villamil-Punzalan and Socorro Gutierrez, the little money that goes into their purses every pay day and their daily struggle to live decently through limited means give that name a painful ring.

Still paying off ?5-6? or shark loans and money borrowed from government financing institutions, Punzalan has been taking home only P20 every 15 days in the last two years.

Gutierrez manages to net P8,786 every half of the month, but her family cannot live on that alone.

But they are able to remain as teachers because they have developed other sources of income.

Punzalan, 44, a Teacher 3 on her 17th year in the profession, earns extra from rice and vegetables grown in a one-hectare farm that her husband tills in Barangay Lanang in Candaba, Pampanga. She dropped a plan to work again abroad, having been cheated by an illegal job recruiter when she entered Australia in 2007.

Gutierrez, 48, a Teacher 1 on her 28th year in service, prepared for harder times.

On a P137,000 loan from a government bank in 1991, she built a six-door apartment in Balanga City in Bataan. Her husband, a high school graduate, pays the loan at P1,060 monthly through his income from driving a tricycle.

Alternative income

Punzalan and Gutierrez belong to the growing ranks of teachers who live now on income other than teaching.

?Some give tutorial classes. Others sell paper, notebook and other supplies to students, sell jewelry or just about anything. Others sell insurance or Avon products or ready-to-wear clothes or bring anything that they can sell in school,? said James Pagaduan, chair of the Action and Solidarity for the Empowerment of Teachers (Assert) in Central Luzon.

?Usually, teachers are buried in debts,? he said.

It does not have to be this way, according to the Association of the Department of Education Directors Inc. (ADD).

?We are aware of the sad plight of our teachers, whose present salary cannot keep up with present inflation rate, so much so that many of them had given up their profession to work as domestic help in other countries,? said a resolution approved by 16 regional directors and 18 heads of bureaus, services and centers of the Department of Education on May 26.

They asked the government for a P9,000 across-the-board increase for the 521,620 public elementary and high school teachers in the country.

Cops, soldiers better paid

A study by the ADD on entry level salaries showed that policemen and soldiers are better paid than teachers.

For instance, a Police Officer 1 (PO1) with a college degree gets P24,215.75 as gross pay monthly. A second lieutenant in the military receives P25,141.90 monthly.

On the other hand, a Teacher 1?armed with a college degree and a board license?is paid P14,026 a month. A soldier, undergraduate at that and with a rank of private in the AFP, is better off with P15,982.60.

Worse, teachers do not get longevity pay unlike policemen and soldiers who are given P400 to P1,500 monthly.

Subsistence allowance is not among the benefits of teachers. Their counterparts in the police and military get P2,700 monthly.

While hazard pay for policemen and soldiers goes a low of P240 monthly, there is none for teachers, many of whom suffer from various illnesses.

Teachers, pegged at Salary Grade (SG) 10 (P12,026) for almost 30 years now, should start at SG 17 (P18,082), the DepEd said in a briefing on the third wave of salary standardization through Senate Joint Resolution No. 23.

Low salary, high demands

This was the same finding of the congressional commission on education (EdCom) way back in 1991 when they recommended that the salary grade of a Teacher 1 should be SG 17,? the DepEd said.

?The EdCom report concluded that the level of compensation of teachers is low relative to the functional definition of the teaching job, the sensitiveness of the teaching responsibility, the technical requirements of the job, the time required for it and the intellectual demands it makes,? it said.