Toong classrooms unsafe for pupils

A THREE-room school building in the mountain barangay of Toong in Cebu City will have to be abandoned after a landslide on Monday made it unsafe to occupy.

Grade school pupils have resumed classes but stay in open-sided sheds while city engineers check the structures and topography.

Lack of classrooms was already a problem in June but worsened after seven grade school sections were forced to evacuate their classrooms after last Sunday’s downpour caused a landslide.

The engineer who inspected the structures said the grade 1 classroom was in danger of collapsing.

The concrete wall separated from the column by two inches and it lacked iron bars to support it, he said in a report to Dr. Rhea Mar Angtod, the Cebu City Schools Division superintendent. Large cracks also appeared on the floor. Other classroom which had wooden walls did not pose a problem for safety.

“We must abandon the building because the lives of the teachers and students are not expendable,” said Julius Angel of the Local School Board.

School officials would have to look for a site to transfer and hope a non-government organization would adopt the Toong Integrated School and help buy the land where they could relocate.

“This is already an eye-opener for everyone. If one wishes to build a school, soil testing should be done first to determine if the place is safe from landslides,” Angel said.

School principal Edwin Villamor in his report said that students are temporarily using a makeshift classroom beside the school stage but were uncomfortable and found it hard to focus on their lessons.

The simple shed is made of posts and GI sheets as a roof. /Correspondent Christine Emily L. Pantaleon