According to Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, chair of the Senate committee on education, stakeholders are supportive of returning the opening of classes to June, saying teachers and learners can endure monsoon rains better than the heat of the dry season inside classrooms. “My humble opinion is we should go back to the original summer break,” he said during a recent public hearing.
In response, Department of Education Assistant Secretary Francis Cesar Bringas said it can take five years to gradually revert to a June school opening, saying certain factors have to be considered, such as the standard 220 days of classes, and the two-month break for teachers will have to be sacrificed, requiring budgets for overtime pay.
Gatchalian noted that since last March, students have reportedly passed out during outdoor activities due to the extreme heat. During the hearing, he also asked about the reported overcrowding of students in classrooms, noting that congestion at the junior high school level was about 41 percent, while at the senior high school level it is at 51 percent.
DepEd officials said about 159,000 classrooms need to be constructed, including 400 damaged by typhoons. It apparently needs about P397 billion, but was only allocated about P10 billion.
Further, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers urged lawmakers to restore the impending cuts and increase the overall budget allocation for the education sector, nothing that the proposed budget for all state universities and colleges next year is only P100,88 billion, lower than this year’s P107.3 billion. The group also scored Finance Secretary Benjamin Diokno for saying that free college education is unsustainable.
With so many issues that need to be addressed, the DepEd certainly has a lot on its plate. There is the need to decide if the school opening schedule will revert to the previous one, a continued dearth of classrooms, and even the free college education program seemingly being undermined from within, all as a solution to the education crisis in the country has yet to be found. This are challenges that the DepEd will have to face, and while the attention is greatest just before schools open for this year, it will have to sustain whatever gains or momentum it has gathered for many more schoolyears before Filipinos can feel the improvements, if any, being instituted by its current leadership.*
