By Reisha Mae F. Valdez, UC student
A school should be a place where children learn to read the world, not a place where families wait for the water to recede.
Yet when the rain refuses to stop, classrooms and covered courts become temporary homes. Desks are pushed aside, sleeping mats replace school chairs, and lessons are suspended as families learn another kind of lesson: how to survive when the ground beneath them no longer feels safe.
This has become painfully familiar in the Philippines. As heavy rains continue to batter communities, schools once again carry the burden of sheltering families displaced by floods and landslides. The irony is difficult to ignore. The same spaces meant to protect a child’s future are repeatedly forced to protect their present.
The Department of Education has repeatedly raised concerns over the use of schools as evacuation centers because disasters do not simply interrupt classes. They disrupt education itself. When classrooms become shelters, children lose days of learning while teachers become part of emergency operations, and facilities are left carrying the strain of overcrowding, poor sanitation, and damage that may take months to repair.
For families, however, the choice is rarely simple.
What would you do if the rain had already entered your home? If the hillside above you had begun to move? If staying meant risking the lives of your children, but leaving meant sleeping on a concrete floor with dozens of strangers?
You go where there is a roof.
That is why the proposed P7.2-trillion national budget for 2027, which includes P3.06 billion for evacuation centers, offers more than another figure in a government document. It offers the possibility of giving displaced families somewhere safer to go when their homes can no longer protect them.
But money alone does not make a shelter safe.
An evacuation center needs more than four walls. It needs clean water, adequate toilets, proper sanitation, privacy, and enough space for families to live with dignity. It must also account for the realities of each community, because a center built without understanding the dangers around it may become little more than another structure waiting for the next disaster.
Sen. Panfilo Lacson has raised concerns over the proposed uniform allocation of P180 million for each of the country’s 17 regions. Disaster risks are not uniform, and neither should our preparations be. Some communities face floods, others landslides, volcanic eruptions, storm surges, or earthquakes. Their needs cannot simply be reduced to identical figures on a spreadsheet.
More importantly, every peso intended for protection must reach the people it was meant to protect.
We have seen what happens when public funds lose their purpose. Projects become numbers, budgets become opportunities, and promises disappear beneath layers of paperwork. Evacuation centers must never become another monument to poor planning or political convenience.
Because when disaster arrives, nobody asks which politician funded the building. They ask whether it will stand.
A nation that repeatedly tells its people to be resilient should also ask how much resilience it is willing to demand from them. Filipinos should not have to choose between remaining in a dangerous home and seeking refuge in an overcrowded school.
Perhaps the real measure of disaster preparedness is not how quickly we respond after tragedy, but how seriously we prepare before it arrives.
A school should be where children build their futures, not where families seek refuge, and when the rain finally fades, may that shelter stand as proof that their lives were worth protecting.
