What It’s Really Like For A 9th Grader With A 10AM To 6:30PM Split Shift In The Philippines: Lessons For Parents
5:45 a.m. in our small Quezon City apartment, the neighbor’s rooster is already crowing over the sound of early tricycle traffic down the street. I’m spreading margarine on pandesal for breakfast, and my daughter Lila is leaning against the fridge, squinting at the city bus app on her old phone. “Mama, the 8:30 is already at the last stop before ours,” she says. “Do you think it’s full already?”
This is our new normal, now that Lila’s in 9th grade at our local public high school. Like most overcrowded public schools in the country, we split the student body into shifts to make up for not enough classrooms and not enough teachers. Seventh and eighth graders get the early shift, starting at 6 a.m. and wrapping up by 12:30 p.m. Upperclassmen get the late shift: 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., five days a week. We switched from a small private school last year after tuition jumped 30% post-pandemic, so this is the first time either of us has navigated this kind of schedule. The biggest daily stress isn’t the homework or the exams, it’s the 45-minute bus commute into the city: Lila leaves our subdivision at 8:20 a.m., and if that 8:30 bus is full, she has to wait 20 minutes for the next one, which puts her at the school gate after the first bell.
The first month of school, I was frustrated. Lila was falling asleep over her math worksheets at night, she forgot her PE uniform twice, and her quiz scores were 10 to 15 points lower than they were in 8th grade. I kept asking her why she wasn’t trying harder, why she couldn’t just get up earlier to catch an earlier bus. I thought she was getting distracted by texting her friends or watching too many K-dramas after dinner. Then one Tuesday in August, it rained so hard the streets flooded knee-deep a few blocks from our house. Lila got home at 8 p.m., her uniform soaked through, her history textbook damp at the edges. She’d stood in the aisle the whole ride, holding her backpack over her head to keep her books dry, and she just sat down at our dining table and cried. She said she was tired of rushing every single morning, tired of staring down the road hoping the next bus would have an empty seat for her. That’s when I realized I’d been looking at the problem the wrong way.
I started asking other parents in Lila’s class group chat about their commutes, and turns out more than half of them deal with the exact same worry every morning. Most kids take public transport, and the 8 a.m. rush is a mix of students and office workers, so buses fill up fast before they even hit the stops near our subdivision. Over the past three months, we’ve tested small, low-cost changes that have made a huge difference, and I’ve shared these with other parents who are just starting out with split shift schedules.
The first thing we did was move all morning prep to the night before. Every night after dinner, Lila lays out her uniform, packs her bag with all her homework and books, fills her water bottle, and I pack her lunch and put it by the door. That means she doesn’t have to rush around at 5:30 a.m. getting everything ready, and she can sleep until 6:15 a.m. instead of 5:30 a.m. That 45 extra minutes of sleep makes a huge difference for a 14-year-old, who needs more sleep than younger kids anyway. It doesn’t cost anything, and it cuts out all the last-minute scrambling that makes her leave stressed before she even gets to the bus stop.
Second, we use the free bus tracking app that the city government rolled out last year. It shows when the bus is coming, and the newer buses even show how full they are before they reach our stop. If the app says the bus is more than 70% full, Lila leaves 10 minutes early and walks 10 minutes to the stop before ours, where fewer commuters get on. That means she almost always gets a seat, and she doesn’t have to stand the whole ride. On weeks when I make a little extra money selling kakanin to neighbors, we pay the extra 10 pesos per trip for the express bus that skips the inner city stops, which is almost never full.
Third, I emailed Lila’s adviser to explain our commute situation, specifically that we deal with uncertain bus capacity almost every week. I didn’t ask for any special treatment, just asked if she could give Lila a little grace if she’s late or can’t turn in a take-home assignment one day because of a bad commute. She agreed immediately, and said almost a third of her students have the same issue, so she already builds a little flexibility into her late policy for kids with long commutes. A lot of parents don’t think to mention small daily struggles like this to teachers, but most teachers are willing to adjust if you just tell them what’s going on.
It’s not all perfect. When there’s a transport strike, or a local festival closes the main road, buses get even more crowded, and Lila still has bad days. Last week she got a detention for her third late mark that month, and she came home mad, so we ordered extra lechon paksiw for dinner and let her skip homework that night to watch her show. We don’t have enough money to move closer to the school, and the school can’t build more classrooms anytime soon, so this is our life for now.
What I’ve learned is that most of the time when kids seem unmotivated or tired at school, it’s not because they don’t care. It’s because they’re fighting small, daily battles that no one talks about much: hoping the bus isn’t full, rushing to make it to class on time, being exhausted before the first bell even rings. We’re still figuring it out, month to month. Some changes work, some don’t. For now, we take it one morning at a time: prep the night before, check the app, and hope for an empty seat.
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