PALO, Leyte – The Department of Education (DepEd) regional office here reported that Eastern Visayas is in need of a total 610 teachers next school year to address the problem on the big-teacher-students or pupils ration in the region.

DepEd-8 acting chief of the regional planning unit (RPU) Belen Hipe said that out of the 610 additional teachers targeted for hiring, 407 are for elementary and 203 for secondary schools.

Hipe told Leyte Samar Daily Express that if the targeted number of new teachers will be hired, they hope to attain the one is to 40 teacher-students ratio.

Presently, there are secondary schools wherein a teacher is handling up to 70 students, according to RPU.

“We need this number of teachers to accommodate next school year’s enrollment,” she added.

In the case of elementary level, the region is need of the additional teachers for multi-grade classes and achieve the plan to open more schools in some villages.

“There are many students in the secondary that’s why there’s a big students-teacher ratio. Supposedly, a teacher should handle a class with around 40 students,” said Hipe in an interview with Leyte Samar Daily Express.

She pointed put that the big teacher-students ration greatly affects the quality of education because of the failure of the school to provide an atmosphere conducive for learning.

During the recent meeting of the Regional Development Council (RDC), Hipe ask the members of the region’s highest policy making body to consider the hiring of the additional teachers as priority in the 2005 to 2010 regional development plan for education.

“We are asking the support of the RDC since they have mo-re access to the national government,” Hipe stressed.

The proposed number of teachers of hiring will be subject for approval by the DepEd central office. Hipe told LSDE that there’s a possibility that their main office would not grant the number of teacher items because of the financial constraint.

According to her, the result as to how many teachers will be announced on May 2005, a month before the opening of a new school year.

Me5anwhile, it was reported by RPU that there are many teachers in different parts of Eastern Viasays who were hired by the local school board chaired by the city and municipal mayors.

According to Hipe, they are now having a problem on the hiring of teachers of the school boards to with in municipalities since many of the local government is nor capable of giving salaries to teachers.

“The mayors cannot anymore sustain the payment of salaries to teachers hired by the local school board,” Hipe said.

RPU has estimated that around 20 percent of the teachers in both elementary and secondary schools in the region were hired by the local school boards.

For the entire region, there are some 26, 000 public school teachers serving in elementary and secondary schools in the 10 divisions of DepEd in provinces and cities.