[Anchor]

The Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education has decided to establish a 'Teacher Rights Protection Team' directly under the Superintendent, inspired by the teacher protection bureau featured in the drama 'True Education.' Furthermore, it plans to select 'Teacher Rights Protection Officers' for the first time in the nation to be dispatched to schools where teacher rights violations occur.

Reporter Choi Ho-won has the story.

[Reporter]

A memorial ceremony for the third anniversary of the death of a teacher at Seo-i Elementary School was held at the Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education.

It has been three years since a homeroom teacher at Seo-i Elementary School in Seoul took their own life in July 2023 after suffering from excessive workload and complaints, but teachers expressed that the reality within schools has not changed significantly.

[Chae Yu-kyung / Chairperson of the Gyeonggi Teachers Union: The suffering that teachers endure has not ended. Malicious complaints, retaliatory reports, and difficulties within schools are continuing at this very moment.]

Following the memorial ceremony, Gyeonggi Superintendent of Education Ahn Min-suk signed the 'Teacher Rights Protection Team Operation Plan' as his second official directive since taking office.

This is his second public signing, following the first directive, the 'Phone-Free School Promotion Plan,' which restricts students' use of smartphones.

The Teacher Rights Protection Team is a system that integrates tasks related to teacher rights violations into a single organization, providing a one-stop response from the initial report to the resolution and recovery process.

[Ahn Min-suk / Lawyer for the Special Committee on Teacher Rights Restoration: I will contribute to ensuring this becomes a professional teacher rights protection team that realizes ideals and achieves justice, staffed by lawyers and psychiatrists instead of so-called special force members, to show what true education is really about.]

The Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education will also select 50 'Teacher Rights Protection Officers' by the end of this month.

Selected through a public recruitment process, these officers will be paired one-on-one with affected teachers when a violation occurs, visiting the school and managing the entire process of resolving the issue.

[Ahn Min-suk / Gyeonggi Superintendent of Education: This is a declaration to end the era where teachers had to fight alone. From now on, we will not leave our teachers alone.]

Superintendent Ahn added, "We will conduct a comprehensive investigation into malicious complaints during the summer break to resolve cases as much as possible, and for teachers who have suffered mental distress, we will implement protective measures through personnel transfers effective September 1 if they wish."

(Video Editing: Jang Woon-seok)