The Philippines, a country prone to natural calamities because of its geographic location, need not be helpless when visited by typhoons, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other natural hazards.

"These are the realities we have to live with. We should know what to do when disasters happen to lessen the devastation," said Education Secretary Jesli Lapus.

Indeed, a strategy designed to reduce risk and mitigate damage or loss of lives and properties during disasters is a must in this country which is often visited by at least two dozens of tropical storms and typhoons every year, not to mention killer-floods, fires and earthquakess, among others. These disasters often result to hundreds, if not thousands of deaths to many Filipinos and cause extensive damage to infrastructures and crops.

Thus, the Department of Education (DepEd) has developed modules and lesson exemplars on Mainstreaming Disaster Risk Reduction to be used by teachers and students to help prepare schools in times of disasters. This type of readiness must be pursued in earnest, something that is long overdue. We should have done this long ago. But of course, it’s never too late to be prepared.

"Safety lessons need to be taught in schools to reduce risk when disasters strike. These lesson exemplars educate our teachers and students how to respond to the situation," Lapus added.

DepEd is set to start the integration of these materials in the secondary curriculum starting June 2010.

The newly-developed lesson exemplars and teacher/student modules was the department’s response to the recurrence of disasters in the country.

This initiative, in partnership with the National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC), is part of the project on theMainstreaming Disaster Risk Reduction into Development, Policy and Implementation in the Education sector.

The project mainly aims to educate the school children on the different kinds of hazards and how to respond to each of these when the need arises.

Undersecretary Antonio Inocentes for his part, explains that the idea is not adding a new subject but integrating disaster risk reduction management into the curriculum.

"We want to prepare our students and teachers so they would know what to do before, during, and after disasters. The focus actually is awareness, preparedness, and action," Inocentes said.

These materials aim to educate school children and prepare them for disasters and calamities that may strike without warning like the recent high intensity quakes that shook Haiti, Chile and theCagayan Valley, some of the latest emergency situations in our midst.

Inocentes said these materials will be distributed to various schools in NCR, Region V, VIII, IX, CARAGA and CAR. These areas are included in the 47 most vulnerable provinces in the country.

The lesson exemplars and teacher/student modules are developed for secondary curriculum, specifically for Science I and Araling Panlipunan I.

The learning competencies under Science I and Araling Panlipunan I were found suitable to be points of entries for the integration. Points of entries are lessons/topics were the topic of disaster can naturally be integrated.

The lesson exemplars contain strategies and methods of teaching disaster risk reduction. The modules, on the other hand, will serve as reference materials for students and teachers.

Experts from PAGASA, Philvocs, and Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) evaluated the manuscripts of these materials and agreed with them.*