DepEd to hire 13,200 personnel for nonteaching jobs in schools

By next year, public school teachers can expect lesser administrative workload with the hiring of more than 13,000 personnel to do non-teaching jobs in schools nationwide.

The Department of Education (DepEd) disclosed the good news yesterday to thousands of teachers who gathered at the Cuneta Astrodome in Pasay City for the kick-off celebration of World Teachers’ Day on Oct. 5.

In his keynote speech, Education Undersecretary Jesus Mateo announced that the lower House has approved the agency’s proposed 2017 budget amounting to P567 billion, which is 34 percent bigger than this year’s allocation.

“The substantial part of the budget will not only address critical resources but also other requirements,” Mateo told the teachers. “You’ve been telling us that you lack support staff, so now the DepEd has started creating non-teaching staff for schools but this will be done gradually.”

In an interview, Mateo said P4 billion of the P567-billion budget has been earmarked for the hiring of 13,266 personnel to handle non-teaching jobs such as financial and administrative tasks. A big bulk of these non-teaching employees will be assigned to senior high schools, he said.

The number is a huge jump from the 2,500 non-teaching items the agency opened in 2015 and 11,000 this year, noted Mateo.

“The number was small in the previous years because our fiscal space was limited. But now that it is wider, the government now can afford these items,” he told the Inquirer yesterday.

He said hiring enough support staff in schools was important to ease the burden of teachers in handling other tasks aside from teaching.

In the previous years, teachers have been forced to juggle administrative jobs and their teaching duties due to lack of personnel, he said.

“In the past, they do bookkeeping. When they are not teaching, our teachers also do non-teaching functions. We are now trying to correct that situation,” said Mateo.

The DepEd has also apportioned P15.5 billion of its 2017 budget for the hiring of more than 53,800 teachers, mostly for the SHS program, and P65.4 billion for classrooms and school buildings, said Mateo.