SEN. Sherwin Gatchalian yesterday said the Senate’s plans to introduce necessary reforms to the Senior High School Voucher Program will ensure that only its intended beneficiaries will benefit from it.
Gatchalian earlier said that more than P7.21 billion or 53 percent of the allocation for the P13.69-billion SHS-VP went to non-poor learners for the school year 2021-2022, while more than P7.3 billion or 39 percent of the 18.76 billion budget for the SHS-VP also went to non-poor learners in the school year 2019-2020.
Citing data from the Annual Poverty Indicators Survey 2020 and 2022, Gatchalian said that for the school year 2021-2022, 70 percent of the SHS-VP beneficiaries were from non-poor households while 64 percent of SHS-VP beneficiaries were also from non-poor households for SY 2019-202.
He said that among the reforms the Senate is looking at is decreasing the SHS-VP budget since a big chunk of the allocation benefits non-poor learners.
He said there should be strict screening of beneficiaries so that poor but deserving students can benefit from the government subsidy.
He said the Commission on Audit should continue its thorough examination of the records of the program.
“We found out that around 4,000 students in Candaba (Pampanga) do not have documents.
It is impossible that this number of students do not have documents,” he said.
He said the Private Education Assistance Committee, a five-member committee created to serve as trustee of the Funds for Assistance to Private Education; and the Department of Education should also review their process of giving the subsidy so the government can save by doing away with “ghost students.”
The SHS-VP is a financial assistance given to qualified SHS learners from participating private and non-DepEd schools in the form of vouchers.
“We need to correct this immediately and I plan to raise this during our budget hearing because we have to make sure that every centavo allocated to the government goes to our poor learners and efficient projects and programs. For me, based on the data that we have seen, it shows that we’re not being efficient,” Gatchalian said.
