By Merlina Hernando-Malipot To cushion the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the private education sector, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Private Schools on Monday called for a “bayanihan” among hundreds of private school teachers, education support personnel, and administrators to elicit favorable government response to their action demands. The list of demands includes: a call for immediate mass testing, job and wage security for school employees, and zero-interest loans for small private schools. ACT Private Schools Secretary-General Jonathan Geronimo said the government should act immediately to prevent mass lay-offs and school closures in the private education sector. Due to the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, Geronimo said that many private schools face the possibility of a drop of about fifty percent in enrollees and tuition revenues in the upcoming academic year. Citing data from Coordinating Council of Private Educational Associations (COCOPEA), it was estimated that two million students could leave the private education system. Geronimo said that advisories of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) that have “backed the retrenchment and imposed forced leaves and reduced salaries on employees must be revoked and that laid off employees must be immediately reinstated.” He urged the Philippine government to subsidize the wages of teachers and support personnel in small and needy private schools until schools have safely reopened and enrollment has stabilized. ACT Private Schools has lamented that the effects of the pandemic and the quarantine policies have already been seen in the imminent closure of schools like Angelicum School in Iloilo, which was founded in 1978. Teachers and employees from the basic education and tertiary levels of De La Salle University, University of Santo Tomas, Ateneo de Manila University, Far Eastern University, and University of the East signed the unity statement. Other signatories were institutions based in Quezon province, Negros Oriental, and South Cotabato. Teachers unions, faculty associations, and administrators, as well as teachers’ groups from the public sector, have also signified their support. The unity statement emphasized the plight of part-time faculty, who are the most vulnerable in the private education sector because of the seasonal nature and the “no teach, no pay” policy of their work. Geronimo stressed the urgency of giving financial relief to the more than 50,000 part-time lecturers, which is the estimated number released by the Commission on Higher Education (CHED). “CHED chair Prospero de Vera III has admitted that these faculty members are not beneficiaries of any aid program of the state,” he said. ACT Private Schools also welcomed the statement of Fr. Nolan Que, a member of the board of trustees of the Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines, that Catholic schools will try to ensure that their employees will remain employed. The government must support schools in their effort to avoid lay-offs, according to the teachers’ alliance. Meanwhile, David Michael San Juan, lead convenor of Tanggol Wika, an alliance of Filipino teachers, pointed out that “neglecting private schools will only lead to bigger problems” - as public schools cannot absorb all displaced employees from the private sector. Francis Gealogo, lead convenor of Tanggol Kasaysayan, a network of History teachers, asserts that despite the absence of on-campus activities teachers can still perform tasks such as producing online instructional materials, which should be given due compensation. Teachers’ intellectual property rights, he added, “must still be upheld for creating these materials.”