While graduation ceremonies in most schools in Cebu across the country have been delayed to this month for one reason or another, security should not at all be the least of the concerns of school officials in light of the April 6 shooting that killed a mother who was attending her child’s graduation in a Barili town school.
It was from all accounts a crime of passion and owing to the school’s meager conditions, we don’t know whether the school could have done a better job of preventing the crime from happening.
As it is the victim’s child will have to graduate high school and college—provided if there was money to fund higher education in the first place—without a mother to witness the special occasion, let alone spend life with until adulthood.
The official response from the Department of Education (DepEd) regional office was blunt and simple; the school officials and the parents-teachers association (PTA) should pay for hiring and maintaining security within their premises.
Mind you this isn’t some private school but a public elementary school where school officials and parents largely depend on both local and national government to fund improvements in the school building and its facilities.
To their credit the DepEd regional office didn’t blame the school for failing to secure their premises.
How could they, given the measly budget allocated for them and the economic status of their students whose parents find it hard enough to make both ends meet?
Rather than blame, the DepEd regional office said the most practical thing that can be said at the time which is to call on barangay officials to deputize tanods to patrol the public schools in their locality.
As if the barangay didn’t have its hands full complying with the government’s order to cooperate with police in patrolling their communities to ferret out the drug pushers in their midst.
What happened to Rebuyas may or may not have been preventable owing to the sorry state of the school where her child studied in and graduated from.
Even with the absence of security cameras and security guards, the suspect was positively identified and caught with charges scheduled to be filed against him this week.
Maybe the parents and school officials as well as DepEd can ask for donations from the private sector to pay for the hiring of security guards to protect schoolchildren and their parents from would-be assailants.
Better yet, the local governments should spare more funding not only to build classrooms but security guards for their public schools and maybe even order barangays to augment security with their tanods.
The parents of schoolchildren enrolled in public schools may find it hard to pay for their child’s schooling but they also deserve protection from government through their towns and barangays from would-be assailants and criminals.
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