The news from Tacloban City cuts through the ordinary clutter of daily headlines because it violates the most fundamental trust a society can have: that a school is a sanctuary.
On June 22, two individuals opened fire inside San Jose National High School in Tacloban City, killing three students and wounding 20 others. The attack occurred around 9 a.m. while classes were in session. Early details suggest the gunmen, who were 15 and 14 years old, simply walked onto the premises and began firing inside a classroom. One suspect, a 15-year-old student at the school, had reportedly been subjected to constant bullying. Both suspects were arrested, and handguns were recovered.
This tragedy did not occur in isolation. Just days earlier, two separate stabbing incidents rocked Cavite province during the first week of classes. On June 16, a 14-year-old Grade 8 student entered a Grade 5 classroom at Bethel Academy in General Trias City and attacked younger pupils with a kitchen knife. Seven Grade 5 students were injured, with two later transferred to a larger medical facility for surgery due to the severity of their wounds. Teachers were attending a meeting at the time, leaving the classroom temporarily unattended.
Three days later, on June 19, an 18-year-old Grade 11 student was stabbed by a fellow schoolmate inside Cavite National High School in Cavite City. What began as a heated argument escalated into a fistfight, then into a stabbing. The victim sustained serious injuries and remained confined in a hospital. The 18-year-old suspect was arrested and placed under police custody.
Three school violence incidents in a single week-seven children were stabbed in a classroom, a senior high student was wounded by a classmate and three died in a school shooting. This is not a string of isolated misfortunes; it is an exposure of a structural void causing disruptions in the academic development and causing serious trauma and alarm among the learners and teachers.
The absence of professional guards at the gates of many Philippine public schools is not an oversight born of ignorance; it is a prolonged policy choice masquerading as a resource constraint. A janitor armed with a logbook and a whistle, however well-meaning, cannot physically deter or neutralize a determined individual carrying a concealed firearm.
The Tacloban shooting-where suspects entered a classroom and opened fire-is the bitter fruit of a system that has normalized the absence of a security layer that every private institution and government office takes for granted.
The legal infrastructure already exists. Republic Act No. 10591 explicitly states in Section 28 that it is “unlawful for any person to carry a firearm, even if licensed, within the premises of a school.” Yet a law that bans weapons from school grounds is rendered decorative if there is no one at the entry point with the training and authority to enforce it. A sign reading “Gun-Free Zone” cannot stop a bullet.
The same reasoning flows from the 1987 Constitution and the special protection mandate for children. Article XV, Section 3 directs the State to defend the right of children to “special protection from all forms of neglect, abuse, cruelty, exploitation, and other conditions prejudicial to their development.” The Child Protection Policy embodied in DepEd Order No. 40, s. 2012 obliges every school to ensure a safe environment. Yet a policy that stops at filing incident reports after bodies have fallen is a policy that has failed its protective mandate.
RA 9184, or the procurement law, expressly permits schools to procure security services from accredited agencies, subject to the availability of funds. That last phrase is where the entire system collapses.
In practice, the “availability of funds” is left largely to the meager Maintenance and Other Operating Expenses of individual schools, many of which are already insufficient to cover electricity, water, and basic learning materials. A school principal forced to choose between buying chalk and hiring a guard will always choose chalk. The safety of the learners in the school vicinity is shrugged off when funds are thin.
The remedy is to create a distinct, protected line item in the national General Appropriations Act, administered by DepEd, exclusively for contracting trained and licensed security guards for every public school. Licensed private security guards under Republic Act No. 5487 receive training in firearms handling, first aid, crowd control and emergency response.
In a school setting, their primary role would be to conduct bag inspections, verify visitor identities, control vehicle entry, and serve as the first line of communication with police during an emergency. A trained guard’s ability to challenge a gunman at the gate, even for a few seconds, can be the difference between a body count and a lockdown.
The fiscal argument collapses under scrutiny. Assuming a competitive rate of P18,000 per month per guard and a deployment of two guards per school, the annual cost per school would be approximately P432,000. Multiplying that by roughly 47,000 public schools nationwide yields an annual bill of around P20.3 billion. This represents less than three percent of the Department’s 2024 budget of P748 billion. When weighed against the cost of a single child’s life, the investment is embarrassingly overdue.
DepEd and Congress must act before the next tragedy rewrites the same editorial. The doctrine of parens patriae demands that the State act as the guardian of minors. If the government compels children to sit inside its classrooms for mandatory education, it is constitutionally and morally obliged to ensure they return home alive. A national allocation for trained, licensed school security personnel transforms hollow sympathy into enforceable state duty. Anything less is an admission that we have accepted the periodic slaughter of schoolchildren as a tolerable overhead of public education.