When a powerful quake shakes education in Soccsksargen

SUMMARY This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article. SARANGANI, Philippines – The children of Mary Jane Origenes, 29, were excited to go back to school. On June 8, she accompanied her son and daughter, Grade 3 and Grade 5 students, respectively, on their first day of school at Glan Central Integrated SPED Center in Barangay Poblacion, Glan, Sarangani. She first dropped off her son at his classroom on the second floor of one of the many buildings on the sprawling campus. But at 7:37 am that Monday, a powerful magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck off the province’s coast. Sounds of panic and screams of fear, especially from children, filled the air, disrupting opening-day activities. Origenes and her children fell to the floor. She embraced them and prayed for their safety. When the violent shaking stopped, the 29-year-old mother, bruised on her head and knees, tried to stand. Her 10-year-old daughter quickly made her way to the stairs. But another round of shaking began. “Ag akong babae hapit jud siya ma-ano kay nabuy-an…Mahulog na unta siya maygani nagunitan pa gyud nako sir. Nakanaog jud mi hangtud niabot mi sa balay’g baktas mi,” Origenes told Rappler. (My girl, I almost lost my grip on her…She was about to fall, but thankfully I was able to hold onto her. We were able to make it down the stairs and walk all the way home.) With their house damaged, the Origenes family was still living inside the village’s “tent city” a month after the tremor. And while many of the buildings of the Glan Central Integrated SPED Center remain standing, Rappler saw that some classrooms have become unsafe. Origenes’ children are just among the more than 137,000 students in Mindanao whose education was disrupted after the powerful June 8 earthquake. The number comes from over 1,600 schools in Soccsksargen that have reported damage. Nearly 36% of all damaged classrooms in Soccsksargen were found in Sarangani, according to the Department of Education (DepEd). Across the region, over 1,400 classrooms already need demolition and reconstruction. Teachers and schools now would have to confront the challenges of possible learning gaps arising from a month of class suspensions and a long journey for infrastructure recovery. Far-flung schools face collapsed classrooms At Purok Buli, an upland community in Barangay Pangyan, also in Glan, some children have no school to return to after the earthquake. Classrooms at Adelina Tuardon Recto Elementary School sustained extensive damage, with collapsed ceilings and cracked walls. Authorities placed the buildings under a “red” designation, deeming them unsafe for occupancy. The remote school serves about 100 students from the Blaan and Manobo communities. It has two buildings, each with two multigrade classrooms. Rappler met principal Gerlita Wata outside the school gate. The school grounds temporarily served as an evacuation center for a week as families were afraid to return immediately to their damaged homes. The school is now waiting for temporary classrooms to be set up. Where exactly they will be built remains unclear. Wata said she would accept having them built on the same site if it meant restoring a learning space for the community. “There’s no other way na, ito man lang ‘yung donation sa ’min,” Wata told Rappler. “So the best way is bago itayo ‘yung bagong building, magkaroon talaga ng soil testing…Compact ba siya or pinaka the best ba siya matukuran or malagyan ng building?” (There’s no other way since the school buildings were donated here. So the best way is before constructing new buildings, they should conduct soil testing. Is it compact or the best soil where we can construct a building?) She has requested the DepEd for a “learning continuity space” — a temporary, prefabricated classroom equipped with a toilet, solar panels, and Starlink. Authorities are still completing the evaluation of damaged schools across the region, Earl Wendell Lope, the DepEd Soccsksargen’s disaster risk reduction focal person, told Rappler in an interview. Structural engineers have been tapped from the DepEd central office and local governments to finalize the reports on school buildings. International partners such as from the United Nations agencies are also helping in the endeavor. Lope said, theoretically, schools with “totally damaged” classrooms would receive the learning continuity spaces. But it would be a challenge. “As much as possible we want to construct immediately a learning continuity space…we have yet to determine if there are buildable spaces left for the construction of such learning continuity spaces,” Lope told Rappler. In their initial plans for deploying the learning continuity spaces, he said that they may prioritize last-mile schools and schools that have reported more “totally damaged” classrooms within their campus grounds due to limited funding. Billions needed for classroom reconstruction The DepEd in Soccsksargen found that more than 8,000 classrooms sustained varying levels of damage. As part of its final assessment of school buildings, it is removing from the list classrooms initially tagged as having minor damage but later assessed as safe for occupancy. Based on Lope’s estimates, the total budget needed for all of these would reach over P4 billion. Here’s the estimated costing: - P50,000 per classroom with minor damage - P500,000 to P700,000 per classroom with major damage - P2.5 million to P3 million per “totally damaged” classroom From the estimates, the reconstruction of 1,492 destroyed classrooms would cost at least P3.7 billion. “That amount is on an as-is basis only, meaning it covers only the replacement of the classroom.” Lope said in a mix of English and Filipino. “That amount does not include yet the cost of the demolition, clearing of the construction area, the preparation of foundation, particularly for schools that have seen tension cracks in the ground level,” he said. For now, the region has around P9 million to kickstart cleanup and minor repairs. But Lope said the June 8 earthquake reportedly worsened minor damage previously sustained by schools in Cotabato province during a series of major earthquakes that struck the province in October 2019. “The road to recovery [for the 2019 earthquake]…even until now, we are still replacing school buildings, because, you know, we also don’t have the luxury of funding,” he said. In 2023, the DepEd in Soccsksargen reported that the region had a shortage of at least 8,275 classrooms. Shift to modules again A building of Blala Elementary School, a remote school in Barangay San Jose in General Santos City, also crumbled after the earthquake. In that building was teacher Joemar Eladia’s usual working space, a multi-grade classroom where he would simultaneously teach Grades 3 and 4 students. “Parang katapusan na ng mundo, sabihin mo na hindi ka maka-survive (It was like the end of the world and you will say that you will not survive),” Eladia said of the June 8 earthquake. He has captured it on video as the tremor happened during their flag ceremony — the same scenario for many quake-hit schools. Fortunately, some 300 meters away, the school’s second building still stands. There, two classrooms are usable. To accommodate 50 students from kindergarten to Grade 6, they will have designated class days per week. That plan was halted, however, after a magnitude 6.6 tremor struck southern Philippines on June 26. It has prompted a recheck of school facilities in the city. Still, Eladia would ride his motorcycle to navigate the mountainous terrain leading to the school to distribute the students’ modules he printed himself. Electricity remains a problem in their area. He would visit the uphill community to personally answer questions from parents who find it difficult to teach their children the lessons in the modules. The difficulties may be either parents have to work to buy food or they are uneducated themselves. Soccsksargen, General Santos City and Sarangani were among the last to lift class suspension orders. Sarangani, which was among the hardest hit areas, reopened schools only on July 1, but not yet for full-time in-person classes. Many students and teachers in the two areas will shift to modular learning. It has already been a month without classes, and Eladia knows their students are falling behind. “Kasi may mga bata pa rin kasi kami na medyo parang ilang months na siguro noon nakaintindi or makabasa siya. Pero ngayon kasi may gaps pa, siguro baka nahihirapan na siya ulit makabasa,” he told Rappler in a follow-up interview. (We still have young students who took months to understand or read before. But since there are gaps now, maybe they will find it difficult to read again.) “Habulin namin ‘yung mga kakulangan namin, ganyan lang siguro (We will have to catch up, that’s just how it is),” he said. On July 6, the DepEd said it set aside P10 million for EduKahon program, or the agency’s school recovery kits distributed during emergencies. The kits contain various learning and teaching tools and materials, including whiteboards, pens, paper, first aid kits, laptops, and other communication devices tailored to specific learning disruptions. Struggling readers in the region The Soccsksargen is among the regions with the largest share of struggling readers, the Second Congressional Commission on Education found. Rappler also looked at end-of-school-year 2025-2026 data. It found that in Soccsksargen, Sarangani had the lowest rate of independent readers — students whose literacy skills are “at grade level,” or who meet the standards expected for their grade level — across Grades 1 to 6. For junior high school, the province also had lower percentages compared to other areas in the region. It is easy to say that Sarangani must double down on efforts to catch up on students’ reading skills. But for now, students may have to learn outside the classroom as families try to survive in the aftermath of a powerful earthquake. Origenes, for one, hopes that the aftershocks would stop so that they could see some normalcy again. But she thinks her children might be scared to go back inside the four walls of the classroom. “Murag mahadlok pa sila. Murag muingon sila ba na, ‘Ay dili nalang ko didto na room uy, didto nalang ko sa ubos kay makanaog dayon pag mulinog,’” she said. (It seems like they’re still afraid. They say things like, “Oh, I don’t want to be in that room, I’d rather go to the one on the lower floor so I can quickly go down if an earthquake hits.”) Authorities have been reaching out to children and survivors to provide psychological first aid. Quake-hit schools are integrating psychosocial interventions in their curriculum as they try to reintroduce affected students into learning. As of July 5, Origenes is guiding her children in answering their modules while living in an evacuation tent. For how long? That may be hard to answer, for now. – Rappler.com How does this make you feel?