LEGAZPI CITY—Albay has achieved 96.15 percent of its K-to-12 enrolment target with a record 21,767 enrolees for School Year 2016 – 2017 in senior high school out of 22,638 Grade 10 graduates last year.
This is seen as reflective of the province’s strong support for the country’s revised education program, Gov. Joey Salceda, said, and praised the commitment of Albay’s teachers, through whom the “province comes several steps closer to eradicating involuntary poverty and several steps further in expanding its potential.”
Salceda said without K-to-12, some 50 percent of last school year’s Grade 10 graduates “would not have gone to college under the previous 10-year basic-education cycle and would either be out of school or undertaking technical training.”
The Department of Education last year hailed Albay as a model and champion for the country’s basic education, ensuring the welfare of both teachers and students, the delivery of quality education, and providing sound school facilities.
Albay sponsored in July last year the Grand Summit on Senior High School, DepEd’s campaign for the K-to-12 program, attended by some 4,500 educators and education stakeholders from the province’s four schools divisions.
Salceda stressed the K-to-12 program was “an essential ingredient in the recipe for poverty reduction” along with three other ingredients—the 4Ps, universal health program, and community advancement.
“The K-to-12 program will lead to a more equitable country where our students will become more employable, and on a global standard,” he pointed out during the summit.
Albay has launched the Albay Higher Education Contribution Scheme, a scholarship assistance program that has sent to college some 88,444 students across the province from 2008 to 2016. Many of the beneficiaries have already graduated and are now either thriving entrepreneurs or gainfully employed locally and abroad.
AHECS initially aimed to produce a college graduate for every Albayano family. On account of its overwhelming success, its goal was recently raised to at least one college and one technical-vocational graduate per family.
Albay has put a high premium on education and is the only province in the country so far, with a fully institutionalized provincial education division (PED) created by a provincial board ordinance and approved by the Civil Service Commission and the Department of Budget and Management.
Under the PED’s auspices, Salceda also launched a similar scholarship scheme for high school, the Education Quality for Albayanos or EQUAL. Further reforms enabled Albay to vastly improve its performance in the National Achievement Test (NAT) where it vaulted from a poor 177th in 2007 to 19th place in 2012.
The province likewise boasts of the Albay Council on Education, a multi-sectoral body composed of various education stakeholders including the four DepEd division superintendents in the province.
Albay has posted other outstanding gains in education: improved participation rate in NAT from 72 percent in 2007 to 98 percent in 2013 in elementary; a vastly reduced school dropout rate of only 0.2 percent at present versus the 1.3 percent national average; 76,137 scholars in tertiary education, the largest pool of 188,000 college graduates outside of national government, both public (LGUs) and private (Philippine Coconut Producers Federation Inc.) programs.