The Department of Education aims to expedite its hiring process for mental health workers, with the goal of deploying approximately 15,000 school counselor associates by the end of the year.
DepEd Undersecretary for Human Resource and Organizational Development Wilfredo E. Cabral stated that a compressed timeline for hiring school counselor associates has been approved, reducing the typical 3-month hiring period to just 35 days.
The Department of Budget and Management will create 10,000 positions for School Counselor Associate I deployment in School Year 2026 to 2027, following the approval of Qualification Standards by the Civil Service Commission.
SCAs will be assigned to schools with high cases of bullying, including those that have experienced incidents similar to a shooting, in accordance with deployment parameters established by the Department of Education.
The agency is prioritizing the deployment of SCAs in large and very large schools, with the goal of ensuring that every school has adequate mental health support.
In addition to the 10,000 new positions, 4,440 guidance counselor posts that have not been filled since 2021 will undergo reclassification and 'scrap and build' to create an additional 5,000 SCAs.
The Department of Education hopes to deploy the new SCAs by September, provided the Department of Budget and Management releases all necessary documentation by late August.
