There was a time when a teacher explained what happened in the classroom alone, took the complaints alone, and looked into legal procedures alone. The Sejong Metropolitan Office of Education said it would shorten that time. It will change its policy on protecting teaching activities into a 'responsible support' system that does not leave the response to individual teachers. It amounts to shifting its role toward having the education office stand at the front, and an organizational restructuring is tied to it as well.
At the center of the system the education office presented is the 'Teaching Activity Protection Support Group'. Kang Mi-ae, the Sejong superintendent of education, will serve as its head herself and take responsibility for protection policy and on-site response.
The body that goes out to schools is called 'Barosaem'. It is made up of teachers, lawyers, counselors, and relationship mediation specialists, and is deployed to cases that schools find difficult to resolve on their own. It is a way for the education office to take on, as a package, the process in which a teacher had to find a lawyer, arrange a consultation schedule, and separately look for a counselor. The size of the staff and the starting point of operations remain matters the education office will announce later.
Dates have been attached to the organization. As of January 1, 2027, a 'Teaching Activity Protection Team' will be officially created within the Teacher Personnel Division at the main office. A restructuring that also places a separate body inside the School Support Headquarters is included. It means it will be put into the regular organizational structure rather than kept as a temporary task force, so the work will not be interrupted even when the person in charge changes.
The education office also disclosed that legal support has tripled. The Sejong education office explained this together with a response system named the '1·2·3 Close Response Network'. Whether the threefold figure refers to the number of support cases or to the budget, and which point in time the figure is compared against, were not included in the education office's explanation. So it is hard to read this increase directly as an achievement of the system.
It also means that teachers seeking legal help has become that much more common, and it means that once a channel for seeking help appeared, people who had been holding it in raised their hands.
Policies to protect teaching authority have usually begun with a declaration and ended with a declaration. This shift specifies an organizational structure and dates. If a team is created within the Teacher Personnel Division on January 1, 2027, and people are assigned to it, the party answering complaint calls shifts from teachers to education office staff.
The time it takes from a teacher contacting 'Barosaem' to support staff arriving at the school will be the standard for gauging whether this system works. A little over a year remains until January 1, 2027.
