Hundreds of students join a flag ceremony to sing the national anthem at a government school in Manila yesterday. This year’s school season officially opened with up to 20mn students trooping to public elementary and high schools.
Manila Times/Manila
The Department of Education (DepEd) and the Philippine National Police (PNP) declared yesterday’s opening of classes as “smooth and orderly,” but the exodus of students from private to public schools swelled school rosters, triggering confusion among parents and school officials alike.
Jesus Mateo, DepEd assistant secretary for Planning, said the first day of classes went smoothly in general despite the perennial complaints mostly from parents.
Mateo singled out the Corazon Aquino Elementary School in Quezon City as one of the schools that reported problems in enrolment and overcrowding. “As we speak right now, the other DepEd officials and employees are monitoring situations from the field,” Mateo told a press briefing.
According to him, the department’s Oplan Balik Eskuwela worked well. The biggest concern reported to the DepEd’s command centre was students transferring from private to public schools.
Luz Almeda, director of the National Capital Region (NCR), said among the schools that reported congestion were those in the cities of Las Pinas, Caloocan, Mandaluyong, Malabon and Quezon.
The problems were mainly due to late enrolment, Almeda said. “Based on our monitoring, overcrowding only happened in about 5% of the total number of public schools in Metro Manila,” she said.
For this school year, Almeda said triple shifting is no longer a problem. She visited the Commonwealth Elementary School (ES), Benigno Aquino ES, Rosa Susano ES and Quirino ES—all in Quezon City and Navotas High School, where student overpopulation has been prevalent for long. In the last school year, there was overcrowding in 776 schools nationwide.
Contrary to earlier information released by DepEd that 80% of the 20.8mn students expected to enrol this year registered in January, it was gathered that only about 11mn actually took advantage of early registration. According to Mateo, 978,000 out of the 1.7mn kindergarten students expected to enrol this year have been pre-registered; 6.8mn out of the 13mn elementary students and 3mn out of the 5mn high school students did the same.
Mateo said the surge of late registrations was the biggest problem that public schools encountered yesterday. “Late enrollees greatly contribute to overcrowding in classrooms especially in highly-populated cities because the resources will not be allocated properly,” he said.
The education official also said they will accept late enrollees but they will not be given priority. “We will still accommodate the late enrollees but we can’t guarantee that they will be accepted in the school where they are enrolled,” Mateo explained.