THE Department of Education (DepEd) yesterday said that reverting to the original school opening during the month of June would be unlikely for the next two years.
DepEd Assistant Secretary Francis Cesar Bringas told the Senate Committee on Basic Education that the current school year set to open on August 29 will end on June 14 next year, thus making it impossible to open the next school year by June.
“So, with this calendar that is stipulated in the DepEd Order for this next school year, we’re not yet looking positively at an opening for June since we’re still ending this coming school year on June 14, 2024,” Bringas said, referring to DepEd Order No. 22 which states the school calendar for 2024-2025 should start on August 26, 2024 and end on June 27, 2025.
Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, who chairs the panel, had proposed that the school calendar be reverted to the original June opening and end by March the next year, with summer vacations set in April and May.
He said reverting to the June opening of classes will spare students from the summer heat and the numerous suspensions of classes due to typhoons which usually occur during August and September.
Gatchalian said there is no need to craft a measure to revert the opening of classes to June.
The DepEd decided to move the opening of classes to August as the country battled the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Bringas also said the DepEd needs around P397 billion to address the current 159,000 backlog of classrooms, including the repair of 440 rooms that were destroyed by typhoons and calamities.
In the same hearing, he said the DepEd’s proposed budget this year for the construction of classrooms is pegged at around P10 billion, which can only cover more than 1,700 classrooms.
“That is the number of classrooms that will be built by the budget that was given to the Department for 2023,” Bringas said.
As a temporary solution, Bringas said a number of schools, especially in highly-congested areas in Metro Manila, Cebu, and some in the Southern Tagalog region, will implement three shifts of classes to accommodate the learners.
But Senate minority leader Aquilino Pimentel III said that students enrolled in schools with three shifts will be “shortchanged” since the education system is planned to have one shift per day.
Gatchalian said the congestion rate of in schools is around 32 percent for kindergarten to Grade 6, around 41 percent in junior high school, and about 50 percent in senior high school.
He said the shortage of teachers should also be addressed by DepEd since data showed that 9 percent of kinder to Grade 6 have insufficient teachers in more than 39,000 schools, 24 percent in junior high school, and 34 percent in senior high school.
The ideal teacher-to-student ratio is 1:25 for kinder, 1:32 for primary school, 1:42 for junior high school, and 1:45 for senior high school.
Bringas said the DepEd is already analyzing teacher deployment and is looking at redeploying teachers assigned in schools with excess teachers to schools that lack teaching personnel.
The number of students who have enrolled for school year 2023-24 has reached 17.3 million as of Tuesday, according to the DepEd.
In a Facebook post, the DepEd said that based on its Learner Information System (LIS) quick count, 17,389,572 students have so far enrolled as of 2:05 p.m. last Tuesday.
Calabarzon (Region IV-A) registered the highest number of enrollees at 2.8 million, followed by the National Capital Region with 2,263,482 and Central Luzon (Region III), 1,933,651.
The Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) had the least number of enrollees with only 210,324 students.
The enrollment period will run until August 26.
There are 44,931 public schools and 12,162 private schools nationwide.
While classes in public schools start on August 29, private schools were allowed to start classes last June but not later than the last day of August.
The department has also allowed private schools to hold blended learning or online mode two times a week. — With Wendell Vigilia
