DAVAO CITY—The Education Department said Friday the 1-million mark for Grade 11 Senior High School students had been breached as it lowered the expected number of estimated dropouts from 50 percent or 0.4 million students to just 10 percent.
“At exactly 11:17 a.m. today, the total Grade 11 enrollment [has] reached 1-million students,” Assistant Secretary for Curriculum and Instruction Elvin Ivan Uy said.
“More than 1,500 public and private schools are still in the process of submitting their enrollment data while the other 9,300+ public and private schools may still add more enrollees.”
As of 4 p.m. Friday, Education Secretary Armin Luistro announced, 1,039,047 Grade 11 learners had been enrolled in Senior High Schools nationwide.
The department expects the numbers to rise further since as of June 17, its records showed that over 1,600 schools were yet to submit and report their SHS enrollment data.
More than 690,602 students are now enrolled in public SHS while 337,511 students are enrolled in private schools and HEIs. Another 10,934 students are enrolled in state colleges and universities.
“Napatunayan ng Pilipino na handa tayo sa pagbabago. Nakatawid na tayo sa liwanag. Kaya naman pala ng Pinoy kung ating pagtutulungan,” Luistro said.
“Doomsday scenarios are based on those who don’t believe in K-to-12 in the first place.”
The department’s real time Learner Information System revealed that some 610,000 students chose to take the Academic track, over 394,000 are in the Technical-Vocational-Livelihood track, 2,728 are in the Arts and Design track, and 1,537 are in the Sports track.
Luistro, who estimated that only 10 percent of the 1.5 million Grade 10 completers would drop out, said that his “educated guess is that more than 90 percent of the 1.4 million [students] will enroll.”
“The people who are saying that there will be many students who will drop out, they’re basing on wrong information. We base our numbers on the actual census,” Luistro said.
“Either you’re sowing fear or you don’t want K-to-12.”
Uy said the umbers this year were better because, for comparison, there had been anywhere from 800,000 to 900,000 first-year college students each year the past years.