Split Shift High School Schedules In The Philippines: What Parents And Teachers Need To Know
It’s 7:45 a.m. in our small subdivision outside Cebu, and the half-eaten pandesal on our kitchen table is already going stale. My 9th grade daughter Lila is shoving a crumpled notebook into her backpack, her uniform still warm from the iron, even though her first bell doesn’t ring for another two hours and fifteen minutes. “If I miss the 8 o’clock bus, the next one’s always full by the time it gets to our stop,” she mumbles, tapping the bus tracking app on her three-year-old phone. “Last time I waited, the driver just kept going. No standing room.”
Most public high schools in our area run split shifts, because there just aren’t enough classrooms or teachers to fit all four year levels at the same time. Seventh and eighth graders get the early shift, 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., and 9th and 10th get the late one: 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. When Lila first moved up to 9th grade back in June, I thought the later start meant she’d finally get to sleep in a little, something all teenagers need. I didn’t account for the commute.
We live 12 kilometers outside the city center, and Lila can’t walk or bike to school—there’s no sidewalk along the highway, and daily tricycle fare would eat up half my monthly profit from the ube cakes I sell online. So the bus is our only option. The route only comes every 45 minutes, and by the second bus of the morning, all the seats are taken by students from the subdivisions further up the road. Even standing room is limited, after a city ordinance banned overloading a couple years back. If the 8 o’clock is full, Lila’s stuck waiting another 45 minutes, and that almost always means she’s late for first period. Last month she tried leaving 15 minutes later to get an extra half hour of sleep, ended up with a detention for being 10 minutes late. Now she never cuts it close.
She gets to school at 9:15 most days, waits 45 minutes outside the gate before class starts, then sits through almost eight hours of classes with only a 1-hour lunch break. By the time the final bell rings at 6:30, it’s already dark, and she has to wait another 20 minutes for the bus home. She gets to our gate around 7:30 most nights, and half the time she’s asleep leaning on the gate post by the time I get out to meet her. Last week I picked her up from the bus stop, and she fell asleep in the tricycle before we even made it to the isaw stand she’d been asking for all day. Her backpack was so heavy with textbooks she could barely lift it when we got home.
I’ve talked to other parents of 9th graders in our area, and almost everyone has the same story. The split shift system is a necessary workaround for underfunded schools, but no one talks about how the extra commute and wonky hours wear on kids, both in and out of the classroom. Lila’s grades dropped a little this quarter, not because she’s not trying, but because she’s too tired after a full day of class and commute to spend more than an hour on homework most nights. I used to get frustrated with her for falling asleep on the couch before she finished her assignments, until I counted up the hours: she gets up at 6:30 a.m., gets home at 7:30 p.m., and if she finishes homework by 10:30, that’s only 8 hours of sleep, if she doesn’t lie awake worrying about the next day’s bus.
Over the past few months, we’ve figured out a few small things that make the load lighter, things any parent or teacher can do without extra time or money. For parents like me, the first thing was packing a small emergency kit that lives by the front door, so Lila never leaves without it. It has a pack of band aids, a small portable fan, an extra bottle of cold water, and 50 pesos extra change for the bus in case the app glitches and she can’t pay via QR. It takes me 2 minutes to refill the water every night after dinner, and it saved her when she got a blister from standing on the bus a few months back. I also stopped bugging her to start homework the second she walks in the door. Now we set a rule: she gets 15 minutes to lie on the couch and scroll through TikTok or eat a snack before she has to sit down at the table. That small break makes a huge difference in how much she can get done.
For teachers, there are small changes that go a long way too. Lila’s math teacher started posting all homework assignments in the class Facebook group instead of making everyone copy them down by hand at the end of the day, when everyone’s already shoving their bags to leave. That cuts out 5 minutes of rush, and no one misses an assignment because they were in a hurry to catch the bus. Her science teacher stopped requiring printed copies of lab reports, so Lila doesn’t have to stop at the internet cafe after school to print, which saves her 20 pesos and 15 minutes of waiting. Most importantly, that same teacher doesn’t mark students late if they send him a quick message saying the bus was full. He knows the commute isn’t in their control, and that small amount of flexibility takes a huge weight off.
We don’t have any big solutions to the overcrowded schools that force split shifts like this. The government promised a new classroom wing two years ago, and construction just started last month, so it’ll be at least another year before Lila can move to a regular schedule. Some days are still hard: last week the 8 o’clock bus was full, Lila got detention, and she cried a little when she got home because she’d already left extra early that day. But most days, the small things work. The other morning, Lila texted me a blurry photo from the bus, showing an empty seat next to her, captioned “today’s a win.” I keep the emergency kit stocked, she checks the bus app the night before, and her teachers keep being flexible. That’s all we can do right now.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Split Shift High School Schedules In The Philippines: What Parents And Teachers Need To Know