EDITORIAL — More students, less teachers

As highlighted in a special report that came out in this newspaper yesterday, just in time for the opening of school year 2025-2026, teachers are leaving Central Visayas in droves for better jobs abroad.

And who can blame them? The pay there is way better and they are able to strike a good work/life balance and they aren’t burdened with other administrative duties, like acting as members of the electoral board during elections.

There they are also spared from the constant changing curriculum, which seems inherent with every change of administration or the whims of lawmakers who think they know better despite never having taught before a class ever.

And while the teachers are leaving, the number of students enrolling every year isn’t exactly going down.

This problem isn’t new. Along with a lack of teachers, we also experience the usual lack of classrooms and the complicated schedules where different classes have to share the same classroom.

But now the problem of lack of teachers is starting to get felt, especially with the stop-gap measure of having some teachers step up and handle subjects they are practically not familiar with.

So how do we entice teachers not to leave?

Perhaps the Department of Education should start with making staying here more attractive to teachers than leaving.

This is a pretty tall order considering there is no way they can compete in terms of pay. But we believe that given the choice between staying here and leaving, the choice to stay is strong; everyone they love is here, everything they are familiar with is here, everyone they are working hard for is here.

Of course, we know the situation is more complicated than that. More and more people are getting disillusioned with living here because of the political situation and other factors, but if nothing is done to arrest this teacher exodus we will one day find ourselves having no one to teach our children.