THE TACLOBAN SCHOOL SHOOTING: OVERWORKED TEACHERS, ABSENT HOMES, AND A SYSTEM RUNNING ON EMPTY

I've been thinking about one detail from the Tacloban shooting that keeps pulling my attention back.

A teacher at San Jose National High School described one of the two boys who killed three of their classmates last June 22 as quiet, socially withdrawn, a repeater who didn't mingle. According to the Inquirer, she gave that description to the press after the bodies had already been taken away.

She noticed him. She had words for him. The shooting still happened.

I want to hold that gap for a while, because I think it explains more about Philippine public education, and about what we expect from the people inside it, than any government report I've read.

THE FIRST CLASSROOM IS AT HOME

Before we talk about teachers, we have to talk about where children are formed before they ever walk into a school.

A 2022 study by the UP (University of the Philippines) Population Institute found that one in three Filipino youth grew up without both biological parents present. Research published in an academic journal on juvenile delinquency found that children from broken homes carry a significantly higher risk of delinquent behavior, not because they are fundamentally different, but because chronic emotional neglect, absent supervision, and financial stress compound each other into something a child has no language for.

I want to be careful about how I say this, because I'm not assigning blame to parents who are themselves victims of the same broken systems. A parent working two jobs to keep the lights on isn't negligent. A parent who left because the marriage became dangerous isn't the villain. The point is simpler and harder than blame: the home is where a child first learns what anger looks like, what conflict resolution looks like, what it means to be heard or ignored.

Teachers cannot undo in six hours what twelve hours at home have already written into a child.

That's the part we keep skipping.

Moral values, ang pagpapahalaga sa kapwa, the weight of consequences, the understanding that other people feel pain too — these are not subjects that fit into a curriculum. They are absorbed slowly, over years, from the adults who are present at the dinner table, or absent from it. A teacher can reinforce these things. A teacher cannot be their original source for every child who walks through the door.

The two boys in Tacloban had reportedly been bullied since Grade 7, according to SunStar. Two years of accumulated humiliation with nowhere to take it. The question of what was happening at home during those two years is one I haven't seen anyone in the press ask yet.

THE LAW AND THE REALITY

Under the Magna Carta for Public School Teachers, a Filipino public school teacher is supposed to work no more than 40 hours a week, six hours of actual teaching and two hours of preparation.

That is the law on paper.

According to a 2024 Inquirer Opinion piece citing IDinsight (an international research organization) data, the average Filipino teacher works 52 hours a week. One in four works beyond 60. A survey of 15,000 teachers across 2,000 public schools found that most of those extra hours are invisible: early mornings before students arrive, evenings spent checking papers, weekends consumed by seminars nobody asked them to attend.

On top of classroom teaching, the average Filipino public school teacher carries five additional roles. Subject coordinator. Club adviser. School clinician. Librarian. Guidance counselor.

Sometimes all in the same week.

The Cerebro study, which tracked teacher time use, put a number on it: at least 400 unpaid hours a year outside their contracted time. That is more than 16 full working days, uncompensated and uncounted.

It's exhausting our teachers, and it never seems to stop.

THE PERSON WE LEFT TO CATCH EVERYTHING

So here is what we have built.

A child arrives at school already carrying whatever the home gave him, whether that is stability or chaos, safety or fear, a sense of accountability or the absence of it. He walks into a classroom where the teacher assigned to him is managing 40 other students, buried in five extra roles, underpaid, and running on less sleep than any professional in this country should be expected to function on.

And we have decided, somewhere along the way, that this teacher is also responsible for catching the psychological distress that the family missed, the behavioral escalation that no one at home flagged, and the social isolation that a peer group reinforced for two full years.

A 2025 DepEd (Department of Education) Bataan publication stated that the shortage of guidance counselors and mental health professionals in public schools has left teachers bearing the responsibility of identifying and addressing mental health concerns, without sufficient training or resources to do so.

According to the BBC, one of the Tacloban suspects had posted videos of himself firing a weapon on social media, visible and public, before the shooting. After the shooting, police said those were clear warning signs. Had someone been vigilant, they said, this could have been avoided.

That someone was always going to be a teacher. Because no one else was left in the building.

I don't think that's a fair thing to ask of a person already carrying this much. And I think we already know where the answer leads. We just don't want to say it out loud.

THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE EXHAUSTION

For School Year 2025-2026, DepEd enrolled 27.6 million students into a system that is short approximately 65,000 teachers, with a classroom deficit of 165,000, according to Business World and the Manila Bulletin. DepEd's own standard calls for a 1:30 teacher-to-student ratio. The actual ratio in many public schools goes past 1:40.

When a teacher is managing 40 children in a single room while buried in administrative paperwork and coordination duties that were never really part of the job description, the withdrawn boy in the corner becomes one of too many to track carefully.

ACT (Alliance of Concerned Teachers) NCR Union President Ruby Bernardo was quoted in a 2025 news report: "Teachers are forced to handle subjects outside their expertise while juggling countless non-teaching duties." She also pointed out that the entry-level salary of 30,024 pesos is far from the 50,000 monthly living wage a family of five actually needs.

The 2026 DepEd budget is the highest in the department's history, roughly 1.35 trillion pesos. And teachers on the ground say the problems have not gone away. One educator, quoted by Davao Today, put it this way: "We are eating the same cake. The same old problems. Just a bigger slice."

THE WELLNESS BREAK THAT BECAME A WORKDAY

In October 2025, DepEd scheduled a Health and Wellness Break for teachers. A rare institutional acknowledgment that the workforce was running close to empty.

Then the INSET (In-Service Training) was scheduled for the same week.

TDC (Teachers' Dignity Coalition) Chairman Benjo Basas had to write a formal letter to DepEd Secretary Sonny Angara asking him to reconsider. According to the Manila Bulletin, Basas wrote that conducting INSET during the wellness break "contradicts the very purpose of the wellness break."

A rest period turned into another working week.

That single incident tells you a lot about how the system sees its teachers. Less as people who need recovery, more as a resource to be scheduled around institutional needs.

According to an EPRA (Education, Psychology, Research and Assessment) Journal study published in 2025, 45.6% of Filipino teachers report high emotional exhaustion. That figure describes a profession that keeps showing up, keeps trying, and keeps carrying more than any single person should be expected to carry alone.

WHAT EXHAUSTION ACTUALLY COSTS IN A CLASSROOM

I want to be careful here, because I'm connecting dots, not presenting a definitive conclusion. But the research on teacher burnout in Philippine schools points consistently in one direction: exhaustion doesn't make teachers stop caring. What it does is eat away at their capacity to respond in the ways that need time, sustained attention, and emotional bandwidth.

The same EPRA study found that high emotional exhaustion was linked to declining use of corrective and supportive strategies in the classroom. A teacher running 60 hours a week, managing 40 students, carrying five extra roles, and surviving on 30,024 pesos a month has less left over for the child who needs to be reached carefully and over time.

The teacher in Tacloban who described that boy as quiet and socially withdrawn was paying attention. She was already doing more than the system was built to support her to do.

THE REAL DIVISION OF RESPONSIBILITY

I keep seeing the Tacloban shooting framed as a school problem. A DepEd problem. A problem about security measures and gaming apps and emergency exits.

Those things have their place. But a school is not a home. Sure, there is in loco parentis, a Latin phrase that means "in place of a parent," but a teacher is NOT a parent.

The formation of a child, the part that shapes how he responds to pain, to humiliation, to the feeling of being left behind, that happens long before he reaches Grade 7. It happens at the table, in the small daily moments where adults either model accountability or model something else entirely.

When that formation is missing or broken, the child walks into school carrying a weight that no teacher, however dedicated, was ever trained or resourced to lift alone.

Teachers can teach English. They can teach mathematics. They can teach history. What they cannot do, given 40 students, five roles, and 52 unpaid weekly hours, is substitute for the years of moral grounding that a present, stable home provides. The school should reinforce what the home starts. When the home never started it, the school is being asked to do two jobs with half the resources for one.

That's the real gap. A child left by the home, handed to a teacher who is herself being left by the system.

WHAT DEPED IS TRYING TO DO, AND WHERE THE GAP STAYS

DepEd issued Department Orders No. 002 and No. 005 in 2024 to reduce administrative burden on teachers, redistribute non-teaching tasks, and protect classroom time. Those orders were designed to mark a real turning point. Supposedly.

But the IDinsight survey of 15,000 teachers found that despite those orders, most educators were still buried in non-teaching work. Policy on paper and implementation across 45,199 public schools are two different things, especially when the non-teaching support staff to absorb those redistributed tasks simply don't exist in enough numbers.

DepEd also plans to hire 32,916 new Teacher I positions in 2026, one of the biggest single-year hiring efforts in the department's history, according to Inquirer and DepEd Philippines announcements. Education advocates say the actual shortage is at 65,000, and some groups put the real number closer to 100,000 when you account for enrollment growth.

We are hiring. The backlog of decades of underfunding is just bigger than one budget cycle can fix.

And when new teachers do arrive, they walk into the same structure: same overcrowded rooms, same five extra roles, same salary that doesn't stretch to where it needs to go.

THE QUESTION WE KEEP AVOIDING

The teacher who described the Tacloban suspect as quiet and socially withdrawn remembered him clearly enough to talk about him to the press after a shooting had already taken three lives. A person who was paying attention, inside a machine that makes sustained attention nearly impossible.

After the shooting, police said had someone been vigilant, this could have been avoided.

Who was that someone supposed to be? The teacher carrying five roles and 60 unpaid hours a week? The DepEd system managing 27.6 million students with 65,000 fewer teachers than it needs? The school with no guidance counselor and no mental health professional? Or the home that had two years to notice a child unraveling and either didn't see it or had no support system to act on it?

The answer, if we're being honest, is all of them. The home that was supposed to form him. The barangay (village) that was supposed to catch him. The school that was supposed to have the counselors and the space and the staffing to reach him. The government that was supposed to fund all of this.

We keep pointing at the nearest person in the room. Right now that person is the teacher, and she's been carrying this long before the gun went off.

Sources:

1. Inquirer News, Tacloban shooting suspect 'quiet, socially withdrawn' — teacher, https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/2250477/tacloban-shooting-suspect-quiet-socially-withdrawn-teacher

2. Inquirer Opinion, Filipino teachers need workload reform, https://opinion.inquirer.net/179491/filipino-teachers-need-workload-reform

3. IDinsight LinkedIn, Overworked and under-supported Filipino teachers, https://www.linkedin.com/posts/idinsight_overworked-and-under-supported-filipino-activity-7282689672873394177-x8wP

4. Philstar, Filipino teachers overworked by 400 unpaid hours annually, https://www.philstar.com/lifestyle/on-the-radar/2024/01/05/2297929/filipino-teachers-overworked-400-unpaid-hours-annually-study

5. SunStar Manila, Bullying seen as motive in Tacloban school shooting, https://www.sunstar.com.ph/manila/bullying-seen-as-motive-in-tacloban-school-shooting

6. BBC, Three dead in Philippines high school shooting over bullying grudge, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjegy777xw5o

7. DepEd Bataan, The current state of learners' mental health in Philippine public schools, https://depedbataan.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/THE-CURRENT-STATE-OF-LEARNERS-MENTAL-HEALTH-IN-PHILIPPINE-PUBLIC-SCHOOLS.pdf

8. Business World, PHL still lacks around 65,000 teachers, https://bworldonline.com/education/2025/06/03/676790/phl-still-lacks-around-65000-teachers-says-group/

9. Manila Bulletin, School Year 2025-2026: DepEd projects 27.6 million enrollees, https://mb.com.ph/2025/06/15/school-year-20252026-deped-projects-276-million-enrollees-in-basic-education

10. ACT NCR Union Facebook, Public school teachers' complaints about workload, https://www.facebook.com/qcpstateachers/posts/in-the-news-public-school-teachers-complaints-about-workload-and-declining-quali

11. Davao Today, Amid record-high 2026 DepEd budget, teachers warn of persistent shortages, https://davaotoday.com/headline/amid-record-high-2026-deped-budget-teachers-warn-of-persistent-shortages-and-low-wages/

12. Manila Bulletin, DepEd urged to move INSET schedule to allow teachers' full wellness break, https://mb.com.ph/2025/10/21/deped-urged-to-move-inset-schedule-to-allow-teachers-full-wellness-break

13. EPRA Journals, Teacher burnout and its relationship with classroom management, https://eprajournals.com/pdf/fm/jpanel/upload/2025/August/202508-01-023682

14. Inquirer News, DepEd hiring over 32,000 teachers in 2026, https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/2150164/fwd-deped-to-hire-over-32000-teachers-in-2026

15. EDCOM 2, Villanueva flags unfilled positions, teacher shortage in DepEd, https://edcom2.gov.ph/villanueva-flags-unfilled-positions-teacher-shortage-in-deped/

16. UP Population Institute, 1 in 3 Filipino youth grew up without both parents, https://www.uppi.upd.edu.ph/news/2022/1-in-3-filipino-youth-grew-up-without-both-parents

17. Philippine Academic Journal, Implication of broken family in predicting juvenile delinquency, https://ojs.aaresearchindex.com/index.php/aasgbcpjmra/article/view/13921

18. ABC News, Philippines temporarily blocks gaming app used by suspect in deadly school shooting, https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/philippines-temporarily-blocks-gaming-app-suspect-deadly-school-134126784

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