EDITORIAL - School opening not for everyone

Today is the start of classes in public schools. In most places, officials have prepared well for the event, knowing from experience that school openings are always attended by problems. Depending on individual capabilities, local governments should be commended for doing everything within their means.

Sadly, the same cannot be said of the Yolanda-hit areas. The level of preparedness in these areas are non-existent, not for lack of trying but simply for lack of everything. And it is not the fault of the local governments but of the national.

The rehabilitation of schools in Yolanda-hit areas is moving at a snail's pace, if it is moving at all. Maybe it is a lack of budget. Or maybe the money has not been released. Or maybe the funds are not reaching their destinations fast enough.

But whatever may be the reason, the fact remains that most, if not all, public schools in the Yolanda areas have not been rehabilitated. Where buildings have been destroyed, nothing has been built to replace them. Those that suffered damages are making do with patchwork repairs -- a tarp roof here, a plywood board there.

And then there are the children, or at least those whose parents struggle to put to school, if only for the opening day and the excitement and anticipation that any opening brings. Whether they can sustain the daily routine is another thing, and for which nobody can provide any answer.

Six months after Yolanda and it is still a struggle to eat a decent meal three times a day in the devastated areas. The death from a fire of a mother and her six children in a tent city illustrates by grim tragedy the hellish conditions still obtaining there.

And yet schools have to open. They wait for no one, even if, in the famous quote of the education secretary, there are even classrooms that do not have students in them. And yes indeed there will be classrooms howling with emptiness in the Yolanda areas.

But it is an emptiness that the national government tends to view from a different perspective -- as a reply to accusations of overcrowding and lack of classrooms. To those familiar with the situation, however, it is an emptiness symptomatic of neglect -- no homes, no jobs, no food, no hope, no dignity.