It’s broke, so fix it
Within the same week came two reminders linked to the same concern: class cancellations. One reminder from a former Cabinet member called the cancellations “excessive,” while the other was in the required reading, which is Stephen CuUnjieng’s regular column. In his trademark blunt style, he recently opined, “I am worried about all these school and work cancellations due to rain and flooding. How can we properly educate and be productive if there are increasingly numerous and lengthy suspensions of classes and work?” This led to me trying to find out how many school days are lost due to weather-related cancellations.
The first thing that emerged is that there doesn’t seem to be any single official national number for school days lost to weather (I tried to find figures covering the past five years, e.g., 2021-2025/early 2026), but you can arrive at a figure by looking at data from the Department of Education (DepEd), Second Congressional Commission on Education (Edcom 2), Philippine Institute for Development Studies, and so on. Both the current secretary of DepEd and Edcom 2 have cited figures giving a range of 40-53 school days per school year lost to class suspensions due to typhoons, torrential rains, extreme heat, and other disasters.
The traditional school year provides for more or less 180 instructional days, so roughly 22 to 29 percent of the school year, or a quarter, is lost due to weather-related cancellations. By any measure, this is, indeed, “excessive.” By no means are these days regained. Nor, by any means, are the causes ultimately reduced. As CuUnjieng pointed out, “I understand the safety issues, but surely, we need to do more than just suspend classes and work, and do something like guess what? Flood control!” Needless to say, we all know how that’s turned out.
Which brings me to some other thought-provoking observations by CuUnjieng: “We are the most typhoon-affected country, but this is not exactly news. In spite of all those thoughts and prayers, address this concretely the way similarly situated countries like Cuba have done.”
This last observation puzzled me, but the best I could find out is that Cuba has an integrated system that is very location-specific, zeroing in on specific locations that are expected to be affected, with an emphasis on being proactive and not reacting in the middle of an unfolding emergency.
To my mind, a functioning system would require a greater integration of school authorities, parents, and local officials, with the national warnings being a guide to action. In terms of flooding, the color-coded rainfall advisories seem more relevant most of the time than the old Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical, and Astronomical Services Administration-dependent typhoon one. As it is, our national warnings paint with a broad brush; could decisions on specific school suspensions be determined at the most local levels, allowing more schools to stay open? But this would require, as they say, a level of granularity in data that one hardly suspects even exists.
Both in the media and the government, there is a tremendous amount of pressure to produce suspension announcements in a timely manner. I will never forget one parent’s criticism of this entire system: “For God’s sake, take control of your children’s safety, don’t wait for some politician to wake up, decide for yourself if you feel the risk is worth it or not, because ultimately the final authority is you!” Seems to me there is great wisdom—and independence—in that attitude.
Which doesn’t mean parents don’t have the right—in fact, they have the duty—to demand a better system from the authorities. In public schools, the presumption is that students are located within a certain radius of the school; what then have the local government, the school, and the parent-teacher associations done to map out the locality to get a clear idea of the routes to monitor and the conditions that result in specific risks? It gets harder for private schools and larger institutions, where students come from further afield. But for over a century, basically, we’ve had the same rudimentary system, and all it does is expand the days lost to suspensions because it can’t do anything more sophisticated than that.
In his column, CuUnjieng brought up the private and public sectors: “The suspension is usually for schools and government, and it is up to the private sector to decide for themselves. I can understand the safety of children, especially preteens, but why can the private sector continue to work much of the time when government work is halted? Are the former such superior beings or the latter so delicate?”
But that’s for next time.
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Email: mlquezon3@gmail.com; Twitter: @mlq3
