DepEd receives Samsung tablets for recovery of school documents damaged by Yolanda

The policy of the Department of Education (DepEd) with regard to disasters is the immediate resumption of classes as soon as it is safe and there are learning spaces available. But tents and teachers are not the only things needed to resume normal schooling.

Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) donated 40 Samsung tablets to DepEd., during the turnover ceremony last 29th of November, 2013 (Friday). The delegation was headed by Her Excellency Ambassador Hatice Pinar Isik, the foremost official of the Turkish Mission to the Philippines. This effort was made to help the Department, as well as regional and division offices in recovering what was left of the documents in the schools ravaged by super typhoon Yolanda. 

“Restoring and preserving records is just as important as providing education. The most affected group here are graduating students,” explained Assistant Secretary Reynaldo D. Laguda, emphasizing on the urgency needed to restore as much school records as possible. 

With these 40 tablets on hand, the department would be able to ensure the proper documentation of school records which were soaked, soiled, or totally destroyed. This project also ensures the longevity of school documents from being further damaged by such calamities. 

The said effort has four major phases to ensure an organized filing of the salvaged documents. It starts with the deployment of division-assigned personnel for the capturing of documents, with the use of the tablets, in the affected schools. The data would then be off-loaded to the home divisions for proper reviewing and renaming of the files. Once the files have been recorded and accounted for, they will be distributed back to the individual schools for their own record keeping. Once the system is in place, it will then be replicated for the schools and other division offices as disaster risk mitigating initiative. 

“By next week, we will be bringing these (tablets) to Leyte and Samar,” Laguda adds. “This assistance from TIKA would surely help speed up the process in bringing back normalcy to the students’ school calendar and would eventually sustain our schools in the prevention of the same problem in file storage for similar disasters in the future.”