Over 13K teachers report real-time woes via poll monitoring app

In a press briefing in Pasig City, (DepEd) Undersecretary Alain Del Pascua said about 13,309 teachers were able to report incidents on the ground in real time through the DepEd Election Monitoring App. (PNA Photo)

MANILA – The lack of pre-election paraphernalia and unavailability of transportation service are the common problems reported by the teachers with poll duties through the election monitoring app, an official of the Department of Education (DepEd) said Monday.

In a press briefing in Pasig City, (DepEd) Undersecretary Alain Del Pascua said about 13,309 teachers were able to report incidents on the ground in real time through the DepEd Election Monitoring App.

“As of 10:23 in the morning, for the pre-elections questions, availability of transportation allowance, replacement of marking pens, and the election paraphernalia have not been distributed, absence of orientation and training,” he said, adding that they only received two reports about unruly voters.

Citing that DepEd can still be reached through their hotline numbers, Pascua said they have received few calls and e-mails.

“Actually this is the first time in the years that we had this election task force that we had more than 13,000 teachers reporting, previously, we only had less than 500 or less than 1,000. Earlier, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers called asking for help to advise Comelec (Commission on Elections) that they still don’t have paraphernalia or machines at Placido Elementray School in Quezon City,” he said.

Pascua stressed that DepEd’s task is to report to these issues to Comelec.

“Reporting is all we can do, we let the Comelec act on it.

They (the teachers) will report later if their reports have been acted upon,” he said.

When asked if teachers can report other election-related problems through the app, Pascua said the goal of the app is to provide protection to teachers and ease their workload.

“We will still assess the app and check which items must be included there. At the moment, we don’t want to over burden our teachers who already have a lot of duties to do,” he added.