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COTABATO CITY — More teaching personnel are being accepted at the Ministry of Basic, Higher and Technical Education (MBHTE) under the leadership of Education Minister Mohagher M. Iqbal.
Filling up teachers’ and non-teaching personnel at the MBHTE, one of the 15 primary ministries of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), is one of the reforms of Iqbal’s administration aimed at improving the region’s quality of education.
The Bangsamoro region, established in 2018 by the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL) to implement the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB), is made up of the provinces of Basilan, Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao del Sur, Maguindanao del Norte, Sulu, and Tawi-Tawi, the cities of Cotabato, Lamitan, and Marawi, as well as the Special Geographic Area’s (SGA) 63 barangays or villages that voted “Yes” in a plebiscite in February 2019 to be under the BARMM jurisdiction. With the recent plebiscite at SGA, the BARMM now has eight new municipalities as residents voted “Yes”.
According to the Philippine Atlas BARMM has 4,404,288 people. It has 116 municipalities (plus eight newly established under the SGA: Basilan, 11 municipalities; Lanao del Sur, 39; undivided Maguindanao, 36; Sulu, 19; and Tawi-Tawi, 11. Its component cities are Cotabato (the regional center and capital) in Maguindanao; Lamitan in Basilan; and Marawi in Lanao del Sur.
It can be recalled that in March 2020, the MBHTE issued Memorandum Order No. 154 directing provisional teachers and employees under temporary status with expired term to cease and desist from rendering service effective April 30, 2020.
Provisional appointments as defined in the 2017 Omnibus Rules on Appointments and Other Human Resource Actions (Revised July 2018) shall be effective only for a year. But the affected provisional teachers have stayed in their positions for around 20 years, the MBHTE pointed out.
Iqbal took note of the provisional teachers’ predicament, solving a quandary as to what to follow that time – the rule of law, or humanitarian considerations.
The BARMM education chief took the high road, giving the affected mentors a chance to continue serving, if they want, the Bangsamoro learners.
Iqbal said that should the provisional teachers still be willing and capable to serve the Bangsamoro children, they are welcome to join the ranks of MBHTE’s para-teachers, or those who were temporarily appointed under contract-of-service (COS), with Php15-thousand salary per month, in the absence of licensed teachers.
Apparently, he just could not let the provisional teachers be stripped of their income which they needed for their respective family.
The MBHTE explained that the teachers were re-employed following a request Iqbal made to Bangsamoro Chief Minister Ahod “Al-Haj Murad” Ebrahim and the Ministry of Finance, Budget and Management (MFBM) to extend their services until the end of school year 2020-2021.
Aside from the re-employment, the MBHTE then offered free LET Review and a series of trainings under the Responsive Education System Promoting Effectiveness and Competency in Teaching (RESPECT) Program to encourage the para-teachers to pass the board examination and prioritize them in the hiring processes.
In his message, MBHTE Director General for Basic Education, Abdullah P. Salik, Jr., said that it was a matter of time for these provisional teachers to become full-fledged teachers in the ministry.
“After all the challenges we faced, hindi kayo kinalimutan at tinalikuran ni Minister Iqbal,” he said. (Minister Iqbal did not forget or abandon you.)
This year, the MBHTE is looking forward to more para-teachers to become LET passers so they can permanently join its workforce.
So far, the MBHTE through Iqbal has appointed over 4,000 new teachers assigned in various school division offices (SDOs) of the Bangsamoro region. (✓)