BAGUIO CITY — Cordillera teachers on Saturday demanded that future budgets allocated for education should resolve all the gaps in classrooms and faculty wages that still plague mountainside schools, as they prepare their own national protest against corruption on November 28 ahead of the next round of the Trillion Peso March on Bonifacio Day (November 30).
The Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) in the Cordillera outlined next week’s plans of action after launching the local movement Guro Laban sa Korapsyon (Teachers against Corruption) to express outrage over the multimillion-peso public works kickbacks paid to government officials and several lawmakers and to demand an increase in the national education budget which should be equivalent to 6 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP).
This year’s budget of P737 billion represents only 4 percent of GDP, and has not been enough to compensate for the recent disasters and fluctuating inflation that affects household spending, said Joel Capulong, ACT-Cordillera president. Next year, the projected 2026 budget for education has increased to almost P929 billion.
In Baguio, virtually all the campuses are taking part in a series of rallies next week: among them the University of the Philippines (UP) Baguio, the University of the Cordilleras (UC), the University of Baguio (UB), Easter College and the biggest, Saint Louis University (SLU), according to their representatives at the briefing.
Each campus would stage its own rally on Friday next week, with participating teachers and students told to wear white, before they all march out and converge with other protesting schools at downtown Baguio in the afternoon, said Louise Montenegro, ACT-Cordillera coordinator.
The teachers would also take part in the Baguio leg of the November 30 protests at Session Road, she said.
Ronald Taggaoa, president of the union of faculty and employees of SLU (Ufeslu), said their members are “angered and have jointly objected to any form of corruption in government,” stressing that the thought of billions of pesos lost to graft offends every taxpayer.
Ufeslu joins a growing clamor for the return of the corrupted funds so it would be used to improve public services, he said. SLU teachers also demanded the full use of the freedom of information mechanism to allow the public better access to government transactions, stronger protection for whistleblowers and accelerate the digitalization of government services to reduce opportunities for graft, said Taggaoa.
Capulong said the teachers’ mass actions across provinces will highlight the government’s 165,000 classroom shortage (which the 2026 budget resolves by allocating funds to build only 4,000 new classrooms), and a teacher shortage of about 150,000 (but only 32,000 new teachers are to be hired in 2026).
This translates to the required 2,030 new classrooms for the mountain region or a 540 classroom shortage in Benguet province, 114 shortage in Baguio City, 112 in Apayao province, 288 in Mountain Province, 220 in Ifugao province, 264 in Kalinga, 197 in its city, Tabuk, he said. Capulong did not provide the classroom gaps in Abra.
He said the numbers do not reflect the impact of recent storms, like Uwan, which left serious damages to 148 classrooms. Minor repairs would be required for 461 classrooms, according to the Department of Education in the Cordillera.
Salaries also need improvements, Capulong said. He said Department of Education employees still struglle with their take home pay due to expensive market and grocery items, even though the teacher salary grade 1 had risen from P28,512 in 2024 to about P30, 000.
Earlier on November 18, an estimated 5,000 college students walked out of their classes on Tuesday to stage anti corruption rallies, beginning at noon in the Benguet State University at Benguet capital town La Trinidad, and followed at mid-afternoon by students who exited their classes at UP Baguio, UC, UB and SLU.
At 5 p.m., they converged at Malcolm Square in downtown Baguio, where student leaders blamed the previous Duterte administration and the current government of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. for tolerating the graft which had been an “open secret” for many generations.
This was despite Marcos’ role in disclosing flood control project anomalies during his recent State of the Nation Address in April.
The students voiced their sentiments about education budget cuts, local threats to livelihoods like a public-private partnership proposal by a mall giant to build a modern Baguio public market and the impending phase out of traditional Baguio jeepneys.
The students also denounced the continuing “impunity” of corrupt officials who remain unpunished.
Many of them participated in previous mass actions like the first rally on September 21 and the October 7 march organized by Baguio Bishop Rafael Cruz, which culminated in a Mass he led at the Baguio Cathedral. SLU students dominated the thousands of marchers who blocked traffic for hours as they walked from the Baguio Convention Center to the Cathedral.
Some of them also took part in the October 18 rally held outside the La Trinidad Public Market to express outrage over anomalies that occur closer to home. About a hundred students and youth activists that day denounced P3 billion worth of allegedly fraudulent public works projects to control Benguet flooding, as well as slope stabilization projects involving rocknetting along the province’s mountain roads, in a rare expression of activism for a normally conservative vegetable trading town.
The October 18 protest was the first gathering of local activists since 2022 and was a display of militancy to which La Trinidad’s Ibaloy, Kankanaey and multiethnic populace and a huge migrants population are unaccustomed, said Kenneth Arroco, La Trinidad chair of the Kabataan party-list group, which helped organize last month’s Benguet rally. /das