Malacañang Press Officer Undersecretary Claire Castro pushed back this week against Senator Imee Marcos, telling the senator and the public to weigh the entirety of what she said before joining the backlash over her comments on the Zamboanga City school shooting.
Castro’s rebuttal followed a video the senator posted in defense of educators. Imee argued that classroom teachers were being unfairly saddled with blame for the tragedy, and that the failure belonged instead to the state offices tasked with monitoring and regulation. “Wag sisisihin ang ating mga teacher. Labis-labis na ang hirap nila,” the senator said.
In her own statement, Castro pressed people to think for themselves rather than react to clipped soundbites. She maintained that any fair critique of her position had to account for the whole of her remarks, not fragments of them.
“Matutong makinig at intindihin ang mga sinabi ko. Panoorin muna ang buong briefing bago sumawsaw sa isyu. Huwag basta sumunod lamang sa ginawang script ng director or staff niya dahil mapapahamak siya,” Castro said.
The Palace official also turned the question of conduct back on the senator. Insults, she suggested, were an odd thing to hear from someone occupying a Senate seat, and she indicated Imee might look first at the behavior of those in her own camp before taking others to task.
The dispute traces back to the August 18, 2026 attack at Ateneo de Zamboanga University, where a junior high school student allegedly opened fire on a classroom of Grade 9 students, leaving two dead and several wounded before the alleged gunman took his own life. Asked about it during a briefing, Castro said young people needed guidance from schools as well as parents, and pointed to cases in which some teachers had, in her telling, modeled disrespect rather than good conduct.
Those remarks triggered days of condemnation. The Alliance of Concerned Teachers demanded a retraction and an apology, with ACT Teachers Rep. Antonio Tinio calling the comments “unwarranted, gratuitous, and illogical” and warning against making teachers a “scapegoat” for what the group cast as government failures on school safety, according to reporting by the Inquirer. Castro declined to apologize, insisting her words had been stripped of context and were intended as a reminder rather than an accusation.
Imee, an estranged sister of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and an ally of Vice President Sara Duterte, has traded jabs with the Palace spokesperson repeatedly in recent weeks over issues ranging from the treatment of administration critics to the messaging coming out of Malacañang.
