MORE than 26.9-million kindergarten, elementary and high school students who will troop back to school today will have to contend with more classroom shortages and a lack of teachers as the nation welcomes its first batch of Grade 12 pupils under its Senior High School program that added two more years to its basic education system.
On the second year of the full implementation of the K-12 program, the enrollment in both public and private schools this incoming school year is projected to reach 26,969,816 students, an 8.2-percent increase from the previous year’s 24.9-million students, data from the Education department showed.
Some two-million students will enter kindergarten while the bulk of the enrollees are in the elementary schools at 14.4 million. Another 7.7-million students are enrolled in junior high school or grades 7 to 10, while 2.8 million are in senior high school including the first batch of Grade 12 learners.
In other developments:
• There are no security threats in Metro Manila as thousands of policemen will be deployed in the key areas leading to schools across the country to ensure the safety of some 26.9-million students who will be returning to school today, an official said Sunday.
“Intel from the PNP [Philippine National Police] shows there is no security threat in Metro Manila and the entire National Capital Region,” Ramon Pranada, operations officer of the Quezon City Police District, told reporters in Pasig City.
• In Metro Manila, Police Chief Oscar Albayalde said members of the police Explosive Ordnance Division had been deployed in the university belt and other areas to respond on any potential bomb threats.
“We are on full alert in Metro Manila. We are setting up police assistance desks and explosive ordnance personnel in case we receive bomb threats,” Albayalde said.
Education Secretary Leonor Briones said while her department was prepared to welcome students, there would always be difficulties that could not be avoided.
“Generally, we are ready but we can’t avoid that there would still be things that are lacking,” Briones told reporters.
“This is not to deny that there will still be shortage, but we still have 10 months coming to fill in that gap.
“It’s very clear that there is a shortage of classrooms on a daily basis in certain places. We’re still trying to address the classroom backlogs and we have a situation that the number of learners is increasing, hence the need to build more classrooms.”
By June 5, some 55,680 classrooms or 51.59 percent of the total 107,920 classrooms would have been completed and available for use.
While it is nearly done with its backlogs in 2014 (84.11 percent classrooms completed) and 2015 (72.38 percent classrooms completed), the Education Department has only completed 15.35 percent of its 2016 targets, contributing to a completion rate of 51.59 percent from 2014 to 2016.
For senior high school alone, while the department has already completed a total of 25,498 classrooms, it has yet to build some 23,796 classrooms from the budget allocated from 2014 to 2016.
The department also has yet to close the gap in the classroom shortage, which is now at 41,880 from the previous years budget.
Briones said some 47,000 classrooms would have to be constructed under their 2017 budget to fill the needs of the additional two more years, and 10,000 of those were meant to replace old and dilapidated classrooms.
The classroom-to-pupil ratio is now at 1:36 for the elementary and 1:43 for the secondary level.
“The demand for more classrooms is getting much bigger and bigger. There has to be a way by which we can manage this because we are managing shortages from the previous years, of course,” Briones said.
“When you talk of shortages of classrooms, we are also talking about shortages of seats, school supplies, textbooks, laboratory equipment.”
Another problem is the lack of space to build more classrooms.
“Even if you give us the budget for schools, we don’t have the land to build on,” Briones said.
“While our alternative is high-rise buildings, it would cost more in terms of all the protective mechanisms that you have to set up.” With Francisco Tuyay
