Senator Loren Legarda said the country’s current educational curriculum should be enhanced with the addition of several important items.
She said the Bill of Rights under the Constitution should be added in the curriculum, which she said, would promote human rights principles.
Legarda also proposed adding a few more items in the curriculum including the inclusion of current global and national food waste situation; ways to reduce food waste; and national and local food waste prevention programs.
She had proposed under the Zero Food Waste bill to be incorporated into the academic curriculum.
The other programs that should be included are Food forest gardening, Urban agriculture, Entrepreneurship, Cultural education programs and activities, Culinary Heritage and Philippine Gastronomy
Legarda said standards for teacher professional development should be developed and institutionalized.
She noted that the introduction of a Teacher Professional Development Curriculum that will ensure the development and improvement of their method of teaching and engaging the students should also be there.
According to Legarda, she filed Senate Bill No. 2, or the Magna Carta of Public School Teachers, which seeks to provide additional benefits and protection to teaching and non-teaching personnel in public schools all over the country.
“In my home province of Antique, I initiated the Education Training Capability Seminars for DepEd Supervisors in partnership with the Development Academy of the Philippines (DAP),” she said.
As chairperson of the Senate Committee on Finance in the previous Congress, Legarda said she sponsored the allocation of an additional P800 million under the budget of the DepEd in the 2019 General Appropriations Act.
On school emergency preparedness, we should be able to build a more resilient education system in the midst of a natural disaster, conflict or health crisis. Short-term stopgap measures have proven insufficient, as in school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic, that we need to develop emergency preparedness plans that take into account long-term learning goals.