Hundreds of Marawi public school teachers missing

LANAO DEL SUR, Philippines — Officials are scrambling to account for more than half of the 1,424 public school teachers in Marawi City who ran away when terrorists laid siege in their villages.

As of June 10, only 675 teachers assigned in different schools in the besieged city have reported their exact locations and confirmed to officials of the Marawi City Schools Division that they are safe.

Zenaida Unte, assistant city schools superintendent, said on Saturday they are still trying to locate the teachers in evacuation sites in Lanao del Sur and in Iligan City in Region 10, about an hour away from Marawi City via overland travel.

“We don’t want to think negatively like they are in a bad situation, or were abducted, or trapped in their homes, or are being held somewhere. Hope runs high,” Unte said.

Unte said it was possible that the missing teachers lost their mobile phones when they ran for safety amid the heavy firefights in their surroundings.

All schools in the city are closed, but the division office there of the Department of Education-Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao is open, manned by officials and rank-and-file personnel.

DepEd-ARMM officials are now trying to establish makeshift learning centers in campuses in safer areas for elementary pupils and high school students now confined in evacuation sites outside of Marawi City.

The effort is being coordinated closely with the central office of DepEd and education officials in Region 10.

John Magno, regional secretary of DepEd-ARMM, said he is also focused on how the conflict-stricken teachers can have their salaries without their automated payroll bank teller machine cards.

“Many teachers ran for their lives bringing with them only the clothes they were wearing when the hostilities started,” Magno said.

Marawi City is the capital of Lanao del Sur, a component province of ARMM that also covers Maguindanao and the islands of Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi.

Many of the teachers already accounted for by DepEd-ARMM are languishing in evacuation centers, some in dire and squalid conditions.

“We have reports that some of them lost their houses to conflagrations that hit parts of Marawi as a consequence of the raging conflict in the city,” Unte said.

Chief Superintendent Reuben Theodore Sindac, police director of ARMM, and Lt. Gen. Carlito Galvez Jr. of the Western Mindanao Command both promised on Saturday to help locate the missing teachers.

Unte and Magno separately told The STAR attempts to check schools reportedly hit by fire are hampered by security constraints.

“There are areas school officials can’t get through yet because of recurring encounters between militants and military forces,” Magno said.

Unte said they are thankful to the Marawi City local government unit for distributing relief supplies to displaced public teachers that gathered on Thursday in Iligan City for an emergency assembly.

“The city government of Marawi is helping them,” Unte said.

ARMM Gov. Mujiv Hataman and his deputy, Vice Gov. Haroun Al-Rashid Lucman, had separately assured to provide the displaced teachers with food and other relief provisions through the regional government’s Humanitarian Emergency Assistance and Response Team.

“We will try our best to locate the missing teachers” said Lucman, also serving as ARMM’s regional social welfare secretary on concurrent capacity.

Sindac said the chiefs of municipal police offices in Lanao del Sur shall also help locate the missing teachers.