Secretary Angara Prioritizes Campus Security and Student Mental Health in Negros

According to SunStar Publishing Inc., Philippine Education Secretary Sonny Angara spent Thursday walking the grounds of public schools in the Negros Island Region (NIR), meeting directly with administrators, teachers, and students in the wake of a campus shooting at Ateneo de Zamboanga University Junior High School on August 18. The brief was plain: audit the perimeters, hear the staff, and force physical security and psychosocial support onto the same work order.

What got inspected and what's being requested

Angara hit two campuses in person — Bais City National High School, the largest public high school in Bais City, and Basay Central School in Bayawan City, one of the oldest public elementary schools in the area. He ran direct dialogues with school administrators, teachers, and student representatives to take the temperature on security gaps and the demand for mental health support. A day earlier, on August 19, he had already stopped at Ateneo de Zamboanga to check on the school community and coordinate Psychological First Aid (PFA) and psychosocial support with the school and partner mental health organizations.

To close the holes the national school security audit flagged, DepEd is pushing three lines through its proposed Fiscal Year 2027 budget: hire additional security personnel, upgrade security infrastructure, and deploy School Counselor Associates. That's the mechanical fix — more boots on the gate, harder perimeters, and a trained adult in the room when a kid needs to talk. DepEd is also calling on the public, media, and content creators to stop circulating unverified details or sensitive imagery from campus violence incidents. The information layer of a crisis breaks its own bolts if you don't run it clean.

What this means for our lane

We don't operate in the Philippines, and this isn't our rebuild. But the framework crosses borders clean. When we anchor a school compound — new walls, new roof, new gates — the question keeps repeating itself: is the building safe, and is the child inside it supported? A fence without a counselor is half a job. A counselor without a perimeter is worse. Both belong on the same torque sheet. Angara's framing lands the same way ours does when we hand a campus back to a community: infrastructure and people have to be torqued down together, or the next incident exposes the gap.

What to track

• Whether DepEd's FY2027 budget request survives the Philippine legislative cycle intact, especially the School Counselor Associates line.
• How the Counselor Associates rollout gets operationalized in NIR and beyond — hiring, training, deployment cadence.
• Any post-visit follow-up reporting from Bais City National High School and Basay Central School on what actually changed after the inspection.
• Coordination between DepEd, LGUs, and police on the ground-level security protocols DepEd says it's tightening.

Keep your helmet on and your work order current.