SEN. Francis Escudero has refiled a measure seeking to lower the compulsory retirement age of Department of Education personnel from 65 to 60 years old in support of the government’s plan to reorganize and streamline the bureaucracy.
Escudero said Senate Bill No. 58 would cover all DepEd regular employees, including the more than 800,000 public school teachers as of school year 2019 — 2020.
“If enacted into law, this proposed legislation will benefit hundreds and thousands of retirable DepEd personnel, both teaching and non-teaching, who would want to spend the prime of their lives doing other occupations other than their usual functions in the government,” said Escudero, chairman of the Senate committee on higher, technical and vocational education.
Escudero first filed the measure in 2016 during the 17th Congress.
Escudero said the proposed measure, to be known as the New DepEd Retirement Age Act, will revitalize the DepEd and ensure high quality of education in both public and private schools.
He said the present system at the DepEd “needs skills updating and professional advancement of their personnel in order that services rendered at the department will be restructured and modernized.”
“This measure shall also open the doors of opportunities to young teachers and non-teaching aspirants for the jobs at the education department,” he added.
The bill, however, allows a DepEd employee to serve until he or she reaches the age of 65 if he or she has less than 15 years of service, subject to existing civil service policies and rules and regulations of the Government Service Insurance System.
