Solon eyes devolution of teachers’ salaries

Rep. Jose Gullas was expected to lead a lobby at the Senate yesterday during floor deliberations of a bill seeking to regionalize the payroll of public school teachers.

A group of educators and teachers was expected to join Gullas to impress upon the senators the strong support the measure, the Senate version of House Bill 2542, enjoys in the sector that stands to benefit from it, the country’s more than a half million public school teachers.

The Gullas bill has already passed the House of Representatives and the Senate has passed on first reading a Senate version filed by Senator Sergio Osmeña III.

The Gullas bill easily passed the House owing to the strong support it derived from representatives. A total of 107 or nearly half of all 215 representatives joined Gullas as co-authors of the bill.

The bill seeks primarily to address the corruption that apparently attends the preparation of the payroll for teachers and non-teaching personnel.

The salaries of teachers have long been a source of unauthorized deductions that drastically reduce the already meager salaries they receive.

A new teacher just entering service earns only roughly P8,000 a month, and if this amount is further reduced by questionable deductions, the teacher is left with barely enough to survive, leaving him or her vulnerable to be preyed on by loan sharks to where he or she often ends up going.

By moving the preparation and release of the payroll to the regions, the huge expense and inconvenience of going to Manila to complain about salaries will be eliminated or at least drastically reduced.

And by facilitating the avenue for complaining and monitoring, the Gullas bill will thus make it harder for corruption to affect the salaries of teachers.

Joining Gullas in lobbying for the bill at the Senate were Philippine Public School Teachers Association president Loreto Rafols, former Central Visayas regional education director Eladio Dioko, incumbent regional education director Carolino Mordeno, Cebu schools division superintendent Gloria Pinili and leaders of national teachers associations.

Committee chairman Renato Cayetano had already promised to support the bill in a visit to Cebu.

The bill also seeks to have the paychecks of teachers released three days before they are due, accompanied by fully itemized payslips.

For nearly a hundred years since the creation of the education department, only the Payroll Service Division at the Manila central office handles the payroll of some 485,000 public school teachers and non-teaching personnel. — Freeman News Service