SCHOOLS are supposed to speak of possibility. The bell should signal the start of another lesson. The rush of students down the corridors indicates their eagerness or reluctance to enter their classrooms. The teachers standing at their doors are probably thinking about their classrooms, their students, and whether their students understood the previous day’s lesson. The loud noise in the hallway should not make people wonder if it was a gunshot.
Yet the recent incidents of school violence in the Philippines make it necessary to consider the safety of students and teachers in these schools.
On June 22, 2026, a shooting at San Jose National High School in Tacloban City killed three students and injured around 20 others. Less than two months later, another school tragedy occurred in Zamboanga City when a student brought firearms into the school, killed another student with the gun, and then died by suicide. Furthermore, the shooting was livestreamed on social media, making it the second school shooting in the Philippines within less than two months, according to Reuters.
Though school shootings in the Philippines are rare, they are by no means an excuse for the lack of efforts to be made to ensure the safety of school students throughout the nation. Two school shooting incidents in the Philippines are two too many. Perhaps, next time, someone will discuss school safety in the country when somebody dies in one of these shootings.
Whenever there is violence in a school, people think about the students. We should think of the students, as they are the ones entrusted to the schools. However, there is another group of people within the school who are also vulnerable to violence: the teachers and the school personnel.
Teachers already have a lot to do within the school: teaching, planning lessons, checking student outputs, keeping records, communicating with parents, teaching and managing classrooms, implementing government programs, attending meetings, preparing reports, and responding to students’ needs. On top of all that, during emergencies, teachers have one additional responsibility: to protect all individuals in the school.
When faced with a shooting, fire, earthquake, bomb threat, stabbing, or any form of violent incident in the school, teachers are expected to be the adults who know what to do. Teachers have to remain calm in the face of panicking children. They have to account for their students. They may have to lock doors, move the learners away from the windows, communicate with the school administrator, administer first aid, and place themselves between the danger and the children that they are entrusted with looking after.
But who will protect the teacher?
Sometimes, when dealing with the situation of school violence, we romanticize the teacher and look at them as heroes. However, teachers are also human beings who have families to care for at home. Teachers can also experience fear and panic when faced with danger to their students. They can also experience trauma and even be killed in the process. The recent incident in Zamboanga revealed that the attacker attempted to shoot the teacher before another student was killed. This is an issue that everyone involved in the education system should be disturbed by, as someone with a firearm in their classroom puts everyone at risk.
Following the shooting in Tacloban, several government agencies conducted a review of school security measures. Among the recommendations was the implementation of security measures at school entrances and exits and the improvement of cooperation between schools and law enforcement agencies. These suggestions are necessary steps to improve school safety. The Philippines already has policies to protect learners from violence and to ensure that they have a safe place to gain their education. However, policies will not prevent bullets from flying through classrooms. Implementation does.
A memorandum will not be able to inspect the contents of a school bag. A policy will not keep a school gate from being unguarded. A Child Protection Committee will not be able to keep an eye on students’ safety if all of the committee members are teachers who have numerous other classroom responsibilities to fulfill. The government must take further steps beyond the implementation of these policies.
School security should be considered an investment in the school, like the desks, the classrooms, and the technology in those classrooms. All schools that are high risk or have a large number of students will require security personnel, communication systems, controlled access, visitor protocols, perimeter, and exits. Each of these will have different security protocols according to the individual school. There is no standard protocol that should be required of all schools.
If the government is putting tight security in place for schools, they will have to provide the resources for that security. Telling the teachers to secure the school does not mean that they will transform into security guards for the school.
Beyond these incidents, another issue is access to firearms. For a young individual to be able to receive a firearm from their home, to leave the home with that firearm, and to enter a school with that firearm indicates a failure that occurred well before reaching the school’s classroom doors. The responsibility of firearm owners does not end with the presentation of a license to own firearms. Firearms in homes with children must be stored in ways that make them inaccessible to those young individuals. Firearm ownership within government agencies must also be held to higher standards of accountability.
This is important to recognize because the security measures that exist in schools cannot compensate for every failure that occurs outside of the school’s walls. The parents have responsibilities. The gun owners have responsibilities. The licensing agencies for guns have responsibilities. The law enforcement agencies have responsibilities. The communities have responsibilities. Those who stand at the school’s gate do not have to bear the entire burden of ensuring that schools are safe from violence.
At the same time, there is a danger to focusing solely on physical security to defend schools. While physical security is important, those efforts to prevent school shootings should start well before any student brings a weapon to school. Such efforts should include the understanding of student behavior, the identification of potential threats to school communities, the eradication of bullying in schools, and ensuring that students experiencing significant emotional distress have avenues to receive the mental-health support that they require.
Schools should provide easy access to guidance counselors, psychologists, social workers, and other personnel who can recognize significant changes in a student’s behavior without automatically assuming that the student who exhibits such behavior is a threat to the school community. Mental-health services should be provided to schools as part of their educational environment – not something that is remembered after school tragedies occur.
And once again, the responsibility should not be transferred entirely to the teachers.
A teacher cannot teach a class of dozens, prepare lessons, check the outputs of the students’ assignments, accomplish reports, identify psychological warning signs for potential violence, counsel with students who are feeling distressed, investigate instances of bullying, communicate with parents, and monitor their children’s behavior on social media, and still expect that they will be able to guarantee that none of their students will ever become violent. Yet this is the manner in which we often respond to problems in education. Whenever there is a problem in education, teachers are given another seminar, form, committee, designation, or responsibility.
School safety should not follow the same pattern.
Teachers should be trained to prepare for emergencies in the schools. Such training should include learning about lockdown procedures, evacuation procedures, responding to trauma, and communicating with other members of the school in case of emergencies. Yet, no training should ever suggest that teachers are to expect and confront an armed attacker in the school. Teachers are supposed to be educating students, not serving as human shields in the face of violence. Their responsibility is to teach and assist students in times of need, should they arise, yet not to serve as security personnel, who must remain unarmed and ready for any threat to the students and staff.
The government also needs to recognize the psychological consequences of violence in schools. Even if students survive without injuries, they may experience psychological trauma. Some students might develop a fear of attending school. Teachers might also develop a fear of students who knock loudly on classroom doors. Parents might also develop a fear of leaving their children at school. School personnel will also have to deal with the psychological aftermath of the violence at their schools.
Therefore, the government must provide psychosocial services for teachers and other school personnel, as well as the students who attend these schools. Providing psychological first aid to school staff after the school violence has occurred is important. However, this does not mean that the provision of psychological first aid marks the end of the care that these school staff members require. The trauma that they have endured does not follow the schedule established by the school administration.
What, then, should the government do? No single memorandum will address the Philippines’ concerns about the safety of its schools. There is a need for a comprehensive, well-funded plan that addresses the safety of all schoolchildren across the Philippines. Each school should undergo a regular security and risk assessment. Based on the assessment results, each school should have an emergency protocol that can be practiced periodically without frightening the students in attendance. Each school should have a means of reporting threats to the school. Additionally, the coordination among all the schools, the police, health facilities, the disaster office, social workers, and local government offices should be institutionalized.
Most importantly, ask whether implementing these suggestions will work. Do not ask whether there is a safety plan in place for the school; ask whether it would work during an actual emergency. Do not ask whether there is a Child Protection Committee in place for the school; instead, ask whether the members of that committee have the necessary personnel and resources to effectively perform their functions. Do not ask how many security guards are stationed at the school; ask whether they are properly trained for the educational environment. Do not ask whether the school regularly conducts safety drills for photographs; instead, ask whether the teachers and students are actually aware of the procedures to follow during an emergency.
And please do not wait for another tragedy before inspecting the school’s safety procedures.
There is something profoundly painful about the idea of a teacher standing in the classroom, realizing the lesson plan is irrelevant in the face of the survival lesson. No teacher should have to consider whether the classroom door is strong enough to stop an attacker. No student should have to think about where the safest spot is in the classroom in case someone enters with a gun. No parent should have to worry about whether the goodbye they say at the school gate might be their last goodbye. And no teacher should have to sacrifice a life in order to give way to society’s notion that teachers are heroes.
Schools are spaces that speak. Their walls tell children what values society holds the most. A well-equipped classroom signifies that the school values education. An inclusive classroom means everyone is welcome in the school community. A caring teacher indicates that someone believes in the child. A secure school indicates that the child’s life matters to the school.
An unsafe school, however, speaks of something else entirely. Even the spaces within schools created to protect children and allow them to learn and grow can fail to do so.
Therefore, the school shootings must not be headlines that disappear with the next national news story. They should compel the government, schools, parents, law enforcement, and communities to think deeply about school safety. If our educators are to be relied upon to keep children safe, they deserve to be protected as well.
If teachers are to effectively teach their students, they should not have to live in fear of for their lives. If children are to learn effectively, they must feel safe within their schools. If parents are to have confidence in the nation’s education system, their children must feel safe while attending school each day.
Education should not be a place of fear within the classroom.
The bell should signal the beginning of school and of a lesson, not a warning to run for fear of what might happen at school that day.
This is the type of school that every Filipino child deserves to attend.
And it is the type of workplace that every Filipino teacher deserves to work in.
Kethelle I. Sajonia is a college instructor at the University of Southeastern Philippines, Mintal Campus. She is currently in the final phase of her Doctor of Communication degree at the University of the Philippines. Her research interests include inclusivity, education, communication, and social development. She actively engages in scholarly research and community-based initiatives that advocate for inclusive and transformative communication practices.
