The new academic year has just began and most schools are now in full-battle gear as teachers welcome new and continuing students in the classrooms, polish their lesson plans and develop materials and learning aids that will help in facilitating student learning. More than ever, we have witnessed how the Department of Education (DepEd) worked together with other government agencies like the Philippine National Police (PNP), Department of Transportation (DOTr), and the Local Government Units (LGUs). We have seen the respective school administrators and school leaders prepare their teachers and students and, in fact for the many, the entire school environment to ensure a smooth and successful school opening. Not unknown to us, teachers spend most of their time during the summer vacation reporting to school to fix their classrooms, cover anew the used textbooks with plastic, repaint the classroom walls, and rewrite their lesson plans for the new school year. Teachers even go over-board when they spend their own allowances and shell-out from their own pockets to make both ends meet for classroom expenses, while do some inter-agency tasks and assignments that will pile-up and will make the escape to this educational panopticon an impossibility.
