Raymond Basilio —PHOTO FROM ACT PHILIPPINES FACEBOOK PAGE
The Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) has called the attention of the Department of Education (DepEd) after they were red-tagged by members of the government’s anticommunist task force in a schools division meeting.
Raymond Basilio, ACT’s secretary general, said this took place during the Quezon City schools division’s third quarter management committee meeting on Thursday, where various teachers raised several concerns in their respective schools for the upcoming opening of classes on Aug. 29.
Basilio said there was nothing in the meeting’s program proper that indicated there would be such discussions to be led by members of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-Elcac).
Based on ACT’s post on its Facebook page, the NTF-Elcac showed a slide from a presentation, which said there was “infiltration by the ACT” within the education sector and branded them as a “legal front organization” of communist insurgents.
Basilio said the schools division superintendent herself, Carleen Sedilla, was also present during the meeting and “was able to witness the actual red-tagging activity done on ACT.”
“The meeting was supposedly for the management committee of the schools division to check on the programs and problems faced by our public schools in Quezon City, one of the agenda, in fact, was to address the problems of student congestion for the incoming school year,” he told the Inquirer.
‘Anomalous program’
“The meeting is also supposed to solve these problems and suddenly, there were discussions like these,” added Basilio.
He said that the superintendent herself told the presenters that the Quezon City schools division and ACT have a “smooth relationship” in terms of addressing concerns by public school teachers in the city.
But even with that, Basilio said that how the discussion went on was worrying for them since the DepEd was “giving way” for such an “anomalous program” to happen.
“We will soon bring this up again to the office of the superintendent and that there is a need for the superintendent to affirm that they will not be used for such activities,” Basilio noted.
He also said that ACT is currently studying possible legal actions against members of the NTF-Elcac who made the presentation during the meeting, saying they may file a case before the Office of the Ombudsman.
Michael Poa, spokesperson for the DepEd, for his part, said that he will have to speak with the concerned DepEd official present during the meeting.
Poa told the Inquirer that the agency will not issue a statement at this time.
READ: ACT raises alleged red-tagging before ILO