IF WE go by the figures from ACT Teachers party-list, there is a 81,750 classroom shortage in the country. What’s the Department of Education and Department of Budget and Management doing to address the problem? Classes in public schools resume on June 4.
DepEd has unmet targets from the past two school years. Though the 113,955 classroom shortage in 2017 was lessened by the procurement and construction of 97,261 classrooms, there remains 16,694 classrooms yet to be built. On top of this is the 46,998 classroom construction which the agency targeted using its 2018 budget.
To accommodate the 26.6 million enrolment in public and private schools in school year 2017-2018, teachers and school administrators were forced to employ the so-called “creative means.” These were exploitative measures actually – holding up to three shifts of classes and conducting classes in storage rooms, multipurpose halls, and even along hallways. There were also reports of classes being held under trees and other makeshift classrooms still being used in war-torn and disaster-stricken areas like Marawi and Eastern Visayas.
The country’s chronic shortage of classrooms reflects the current and past administrations’ failure to come up with a classroom building program that truly serves the Filipino youth.
With 36,492 public elementary schools and only 7,677 high schools, the government had been disenfranchising Filipino children from quality basic education even before the haphazard implementation of the K to 12 program that did not provide sufficient funds for the additional two years of schooling.
The shortage of classrooms and schools, especially high schools, forces children coming out of four to five elementary schools to be crammed into a single high school. This means classrooms bursting to capacity, deteriorating learning and teaching conditions, eventually, resulting to the dropping out of students.
It’s no wonder that the number of children accommodated in the public school system gets smaller as one goes from Kinder to Grade 12. We remind the Duterte administration of its constitutional duty to ensure every Filipino youth’s access to free quality basic education.
