A Year Into the Mother Tongue Rollback, Waray and Hiligaynon Teachers Are Torching Their Own Modules

RA 12027 lapsed into law on October 10, 2024, ending mother tongue as the mandatory medium of instruction from Kindergarten to Grade 3 and reverting classrooms to Filipino and English. DepEd Order No. 20, s. 2025, reported in news coverage around July 5 last year, put the policy into force for School Year 2025-2026. School Year 2026-2027 opened on June 8 under DepEd's new three-term calendar, meaning year two of the rollback has only just started.

In Region VI and Region VIII, Hiligaynon and Waray teachers who spent the last decade building their own translated modules are burning the files. Some are running them through the shredder. A few are keeping stacks under their desks in case a Grade 2 kid needs a word explained in the language spoken at the dinner table.

What the rollback cut

MTB-MLE ran under DepEd from School Year 2012-2013 and was later anchored in the K-12 law, RA 10533. It covered 19 languages: Tagalog, Kapampangan, Pangasinan, Iloko, Bikol, Sinugbuanong Binisaya, Hiligaynon, Waray, Bahasa Sug, Maguindanaoan, Maranao, Chavacano, Ybanag, Ivatan, Sambal, Akianon, Kinaray-a, Yakan, and Sinurigaonon.

RA 12027 kept the door open for regional languages as auxiliary media and as separate subjects, but pulled them out of the actual teaching medium for the early grades. Filipino and English are back as the default.

Teachers in Iloilo, Antique, Leyte, and Samar spent years on the translation work. Much of it was unpaid. Some of it was funded through small division-level grants or NGO partnerships. The modules were printed in tranches, revised through workshops, and passed hand to hand between schools that shared a dialect boundary.

Once the new medium locked in for SY 2025-2026, reproduction queues at division offices shifted to Filipino and English readers aligned with the MATATAG curriculum. Teachers who asked about reprinting their Hiligaynon or Waray modules were told the files were out of the pipeline.

Why burning, not archiving

Storage costs money. Classrooms in Region VIII are still short on cabinets after recent typhoon seasons damaged school buildings across Eastern Visayas. Warehousing thousands of pages of Waray translations that the division office will not print is not a line item anyone approved.

Some teachers are also making a point. A file that sits in a filing cabinet reads as compliance. A file that gets burned in the school yard reads as a receipt.

What the classroom loses

Children in Grade 1 who speak Hiligaynon or Waray at home sit through math problems in Filipino, which for many of them is a second or third language. Decades of literacy research, including studies cited in DepEd's own MTB-MLE rollout documents, point in the same direction: reading comprehension in the early grades tends to climb when the language of instruction matches the language of the household.

Teachers know this. Many will keep code-switching in the classroom regardless of what the medium of instruction officially says. The difference is that the switch now happens without printed material to back it up.

The bill the region absorbs

A Waray teacher who translated a science module in 2019 does not get reimbursed. A Hiligaynon reading circle that ran on a division grant loses the printed workbook. A Grade 3 kid in Calbayog who understood fractions when the word for half was in her language sits through a Filipino explanation and gets marked as behind.

The modules on the burn pile were written by people who taught in those languages every day. The law that killed them was written in Manila.