Senator Sherwin Gatchalian yesterday revealed there are 19,000 “ghost” or undocumented students in private schools supposedly enrolled through a state voucher program that so far, the lawmaker says, has cost the government P7 billion.
Gatchalian, chairperson of the Senate Committee on Basic Education, said this incident should be investigated because the government has been allocating billions of pesos for the vouchers intended for senior high school students.
Last year, the government spent P52 billion for the Expanded Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education (E-GASTPE) program. For this year, it has allocated P40.5 billion, the senator noted.
Just last month, the Department of Education reported a 97-percent utilization rate of its 2024 budget for E-GASTPE, the government’s largest private school scholarship program, especially on the expansion of the existing Educational Service Contracting (ESC) scheme.
But Gatchalian stressed that ghost or undocumented “literally means no students at all” as they were enrolled under the E-GASTPE senior high school voucher program.
During the hearing of Gatchalian’s committee, Rodrick Edsel Malonzo, DepEd Monitoring and Processing Officer of the Private Education Assistance Committee (PEAC), agreed with the number of ghost students stated by the senator.
Malonzo noted that the government has been trying to recover P239 million from various private schools. He cited St. Joseph School of Candaba in Pampanga where there were 4,600 voucher program beneficiaries (VPBs).
Since they have no records like attendance in classes, they were considered “undocumented students,” he added.
According to Malonzo, the school said they would explain their undocumented students, but they were pressed to return P80 million.
Noticing a pattern or “modus of very enterprising people,” Gatchalian raised the possibility that private schools were just making money from the voucher program.
The senator also mentioned a school in Metro Manila, which was found with 3,111 undocumented students. The private high school, which he did not name, was asked by the government to refund P82.9 million.
Gatchalian said this could be the reason for the increasing number of private high schools aggressively inviting students, as they have sure earnings with the enrollment of voucher beneficiaries.
Imelda Celso of the Commission on Audit said that based on their investigation, from 2016 to 2017, there were 115 senior high school voucher beneficiaries who were considered ghost students, but also admitted there were also some errors in their listing.