MANILA, Philippines—Heeding complaints from students trapped in flooded Metro Manila streets during last week’s monsoon rains, the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) promises to improve its class suspension protocol to include occasions of severe weather and flooding in areas not under storm alerts.
CHEd executive director Julito Vitriolo said the commission would tap social media and maximize its website (www.ched.gov.ph) to make timely announcements about class suspensions, including discretionary decisions of individual universities and colleges.
Under the current protocol, CHEd automatically suspends classes in the college and post-graduate levels in areas under storm signal No. 3.
In cases of severe rains and flooding even without storm warning, as what happened in Metro Manila and nearby provinces last week, CHEd leaves the decision to suspend classes on the individual schools’ officials.
“What we will do is order our regional offices to collate information. We’ll improve information dissemination so that the students will be better informed in decision-making,” Vitriolo told the Inquirer. “We’ll try to make it easier for our students.”
He said CHEd relies on information from the weather bureau and disaster agencies in deciding whether to suspend classes in certain areas.
“There are constraints but, for example, certain universities have suspended classes, we will collate that information and relay that [to media] for broadcast, although schools can already go straight to media also,” Vitriolo said.
He said CHEd will be “more proactive” and make use of “social communication” to provide students advance information about class suspensions, recognizing that the sector it serves relies more on the Internet for information.
“There will be reporting mechanism from the regions and we will post that information on our website,” Vitriolo said.
CHEd has yet to create its own account on the social networking sites Facebook and Twitter, already used widely by other government agencies to quickly deliver information to the public. The Department of Education has also been using social media to immediately send out critical announcements.