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[av_heading heading=’ EDITORIAL | Wanted: more public high schools’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”][/av_heading]
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Wednesday, June 7, 2017
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THIS TIME of the year, we usually talk of classroom backlogs, and the Department of Education (DepEd) certainly has a lot of those. There’s another “severe” backlog, our public high schools, if the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) were to be believed. With 36,492 public elementary schools and only 7,677 junior high schools, children in four or five elementary schools will have to cram themselves into a single high school when they graduate.
While almost all barangays have at least one elementary school, high schools are found mainly in urban areas and population centers at a ratio of, according to ACT, one high school for every four to five barangays.
The schools shortage could be more pronounced in senior high school (SHS) started last year. Prior to the addition of Grades 11 and 12, government did not launch a massive school building program to accommodate Grade 10 completers from public junior high schools, then expected to be from 1.2 million to 1.6 million.
From DepEd’s own data, the agency is lagging behind its targets for classroom building, meeting only 51.59 percent of its target units for 2014 until 2016. Of this number, it completed only 25,498 classrooms for SHS, or a little more than half of its target 49,294 units.
Interestingly, DepEd is expanding private provision of SHS, relying heavily on public-private partnership and granting permits to more private schools. Per DepEd’s list, 5,965 public schools will serve senior high students this school year, an increase of only 25 from 2016. On the other hand, private schools offering SHS will be 4,729.
The number of private SHSs will quickly catch up to public SHSs and we might see a one-is-to-one or a higher ratio between public and private SHSs in favor of the latter. Outside of congested public high schools our youth have nowhere to go except private schools. Those from poor families usually become dropouts and the number of out-of-school youth will continue to rise. Per DepEd data, 3.4 million high school-age youth in school year 2015-2016 were not enrolled in first to fourth year.
The only way to bring more students to school is for government to reverse the underfunding of public education, which will enable it to build more public schools. Otherwise, more youth, majority of whom are from poor families, would be deprived of free basic education.
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