The cost of climate disruptions: Philippines loses 32 teaching days to extreme weather

MANILA, Philippines — Anyone could see that special education teacher Ronnel Jolejole-Aurel adored all ten of his students equally, but like any educator will tell you, there are stand-outs in every class. 

For the teacher from Northern Samar, it was a nine-year-old child with mild Autism who cannot speak, write, or communicate in any way other than through ear-splitting cries, that ended up handing him a rare breakthrough in a profession often challenged by losses.

Throughout the school year, with Jolejole-Aurel's help, the student's tantrums slowly softened into quiet, non-verbal requests to be held by his teacher instead. After spending days practicing holding objects, the student had finally learned to hold a pen — making Jolejole-Aurel believe it was time to teach the alphabet.

But the teacher's hopes were quickly dashed. Several heat-related class suspensions in the last months of the school year, along with difficulties with remote learning, had erased any progress made by the nine-year-old student, Jolejole-Aurel said. The suspensions had, in his words, forced a "back to zero" for his class.  

"Class suspensions really affect the learning of my [learners with special needs] class, because they have a short span of memory. That is why we need to repeat our lessons everyday [before] proceeding to the next lesson," Jolejole-Aurel told Philstar.com.

"The lesson that we had discussed for a day will no longer be remembered if they come back to school after suspension of classes... Ngayon, lahat kinalimutan na (Now, they forgot everything)," said the teacher from Las Navas I Central School, a school from the division of Northern Samar.

Jolejole-Aurel’s students are among the millions of students across the Philippines who, on average, lost a quarter’s worth of in-person classes last school year mainly due to climate-induced school closures. The time lost is believed to set back the Department of Education’s efforts to recover learning losses from the pandemic and improve the Philippines’ standing in international assessments. 

RELATED: 'Stagnating at the bottom': Officials say time and funding needed to improve PISA scores  

At least 53 out of 180 days, or