Thank you, DepEd AOs

By Herman M. Lagon

Sometimes you understand an education reform better by walking into a school office than by reading the memorandum that created it. I was reminded of this recently while visiting 19 public schools in the DepEd District of San Enrique, Iloilo. There were the usual scenes familiar to anyone who has spent time in our schools: teachers moving between classrooms, children appearing at office doors, papers waiting for signatures, somebody looking for a form, and a printer doing what school printers do best—making noises that suggest retirement is near. But I noticed something else. In several schools, teachers were no longer carrying quite as much of the paperwork themselves. Someone was there to help carry it.

That someone was often the Administrative Officer, or AO. I spoke with some of them and watched others at work. Their jobs are not particularly glamorous. Reports have to be prepared. Documents have to be organized. Records have to be checked. Requests have to move. School activities need coordination. There are deadlines that somehow all become urgent at the same time. Much of this work will never appear in a graduation photograph or earn applause during recognition day. Yet when it is done well, something important happens quietly: a teacher gets some time back.

That may sound like a small thing until we remember what Filipino teachers have been asked to do for years. Teaching has sometimes felt like only one item on an increasingly imaginative job description. Prepare the lesson, teach the class, assess learning, talk to parents, remediate struggling learners—and somewhere between all that, accomplish reports, encode data, prepare documents, coordinate programs, and respond to another request marked “ASAP.” EDCOM 2 found that two out of three teachers continued working beyond the prescribed 40-hour workweek, with repetitive paperwork contributing to the burden. In some cases, teachers were being asked for information already submitted through existing DepEd systems.

This is why the arrival of more AOs deserves more than a passing acknowledgment. DepEd Order No. 002, s. 2024 directed the removal of administrative tasks from public school teachers so that their time could be maximized for actual teaching. More recently, the numbers have begun catching up with the policy. By July 2026, DepEd reported filling 9,937 of the 10,000 Administrative Officer II positions created in 2025. Another 11,268 AO II positions were created under the 2026 workforce expansion, alongside 5,000 Project Development Officer I positions and 6,000 School Principal I positions. After years of telling teachers to focus on teaching, government is finally putting more people into schools who can help make that instruction possible.

The difference is wonderfully ordinary. If an AO prepares a report that a teacher used to prepare, the teacher might spend that time checking a child’s work. If someone else attends to routine documentation, a teacher can finish tomorrow’s lesson instead of bringing both lesson plan and paperwork home. If records are properly organized in the office, a school head gets more room for instructional leadership. No single transaction will rescue Philippine education. But add those minutes across five days, forty school weeks, thousands of teachers, and millions of learners, and administrative support begins to look less like clerical convenience and more like an investment in learning.

There is also something worth saying about the AOs themselves. They are not merely there to “do the paperwork teachers do not want.” That would diminish both professions. Schools need administrative work because public institutions must account for funds, personnel, programs, property, records, and decisions. Somebody competent has to do that work. The sensible arrangement is to let people spend more of their working day doing what they were recruited and trained to do. Teachers teach. Administrative personnel keep essential school operations moving. School heads lead. And when those roles support one another, learners receive more of everybody’s best work. DepEd itself describes the AO expansion as a way of strengthening school operations while allowing teachers more time for instruction.

Still, gratitude should not make us romanticize the arrangement. We should not celebrate freeing teachers from overload by quietly handing the overload to somebody sitting at the next desk. EDCOM 2 had already warned of AOs considering resignation because of excessive workloads, particularly where one officer had to serve more than one school. Earlier arrangements even contemplated clustering personnel across as many as three schools, although DepEd acknowledged that this would not work everywhere. An AO with three schools, several deadlines, and a mountain of reports does not represent administrative reform. That is merely paperwork changing owners.

There is another reason the reform should go further. Not every task that should leave teachers properly belongs to an AO. EDCOM 2 has pointed to the need for Project Development Officers who can handle programs, partnerships, community engagement, and development work that differs from routine administrative functions. DepEd appears to be moving in that direction with the creation of 5,000 PDO I positions in 2026. But the same thinking should extend to other people schools increasingly need: more security personnel to help keep campuses safe, mental health and formation advocates who can attend to learners beyond academics, and enough maintenance personnel to keep classrooms, toilets, grounds, and facilities clean, functional, and safe. Teachers should certainly care about these things, but caring about them should not mean becoming the default security officer, counselor, program coordinator, or maintenance troubleshooter.

A school simply works better when the right people are there to do the work they know best. And adding people should go hand in hand with making their work more manageable. DepEd is also digitizing school forms to streamline documentation and data management, which is another welcome step. More people can help, but fewer unnecessary processes would help them too. There is little wisdom in hiring somebody new merely to produce the same information three different ways.

What stayed with me after those school visits in San Enrique was not a statistic. It was the everyday division of labor beginning to take shape. You see an AO working through documents while a teacher is with children. Nobody rings a bell to announce that reform has occurred. There is no ribbon cutting. The teacher simply has one less administrative task competing with thirty or forty young people for attention. In education, perhaps that is what good support should look like: the person receiving help has more space to do the work that only that person can do.

So, salamat to our DepEd Administrative Officers. Not because you have magically solved the workload problem. You have not, and it would be unfair to expect you to. You need reasonable workloads, adequate staffing, clear functions, decent working conditions, opportunities for advancement, and the same institutional respect we rightly demand for teachers. But something has changed since more of you arrived in our schools, and teachers notice it. School heads notice it. Eventually, even when they do not know why, children may benefit from it.

For years, we have said teachers belong with learners rather than buried in paperwork. That sentence is easy to put in a speech. Making it true requires budgets, plantilla positions, better systems, fewer redundant reports, and people willing to do essential work behind the scenes. The AOs I met in San Enrique gave that policy a human face. So let us thank them, support them, and make sure we do not bury them under the mountain we are finally lifting from teachers. When an AO gives a teacher back an hour, that hour ultimately belongs to a child.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.