Tweet it on Twitter. Post it on Facebook. Write letters to newspaper editors. Call up radio commentators. Knock on the doors of your congressmen. However you do it, go for the urgent resignation of Education Secretary Armin Luistro.
I am prompted to pass on this call in support of Cebu City Vice Mayor Joy Augustus Young’s call for the immediate departure of the hapless education secretary, whose only reason for being in the DepEd is because he is a favorite of our equally hapless president.
What has gotten the goat of Young is the failure of the DepEd, under Luistro’s watch, to pay the 250 or so Kindergarten teachers in Cebu City their monthly salaries for the past five months.
It is not as if the delay only involved a month or two. But five months? Teachers have to live too, Mr. Luistro. But how can teachers survive if you do not pay them their salaries? There is no way you can feign ignorance, Sir, because this has been going on for five months!
It is bad enough already that these teachers only receive P6,000 a month, yes, a measly P6,000 a month, which is not even enough to keep body and soul together. But to withhold them for five months? What is wrong with you and your department, Mr. Luistro?
Anybody who fails to pay his employees their measly salaries for five months has no business staying in office a minute longer. Since you are not an impeachable official, and since Noynoy Aquino is not likely to fire you, you should resign of your own volition, Mr. Luistro.
The problem that can be promptly solved with your resignation does not only involve your failure to pay your teachers for five months. The bigger problem involves your pet project called K to 12 for whose unconditional acceptance you must have cast a magic spell on Noynoy.
Your failure to pay the Kindergarten teachers, who play a very vital and crucial role in the K to 12 program (the K meaning Kindergarten), for five months is just one of the many clear indications of your unpreparedness to implement the program.
How can you expect your program to take off the ground when you cannot even pay the vital participants of the program their measly salary of P6,000 a month (roughly $150) for five long months? There are many other reasons why a resignation is in order. I can cite one other example.
In a live television interview with Karen Davila on ANC not very long ago, you Mr. Luistro insisted that there was no classroom shortage to speak of in this country because what actual shortages there may be are only in some urban centers.
In your skewed logic, you cited the many classrooms in the provinces that do not even have students. While statistically you may be correct that the ratio between classrooms and students would favor the former, no sane man would look at the problem that way.
You may regret bringing up the matter of classrooms without students because you could in fact be held accountable for building them where you have no use for them. If your problem is in the cities, that is where you put your solutions to work by building more classrooms there.
To see things otherwise and to say you have no problem is to be untruthful. And for that you have no business being in charge of the education of our country’s youth and children. You are not setting the right example for them.
I therefore join Vice Mayor Young in calling for the resignation of Luistro as education secretary. At the same time, I also urge Cebuanos to join the call. We need a secretary who is truthful, has an ear to the ground, and who has the concern of his people in his heart.
The affected Kindergarten teachers need your help. Despite not having received their meager salaries of P6,000 a month for five months, they dare not complain lest they lose their jobs. It may not pay much, and it may not pay for five months, but it’s the only one they have.