With less than a week before classes open in public schools, some 18.83 million students have enrolled for the school year 2023-2024 so far, the Department of Education (DepEd) said Thursday.
This is expected to rise to 28 million enrollees—the bulk of them in public schools–when classes open on Aug. 29.
Data from the DepEd show that enrollment was highest in Region IV-A or Calabarzon, with 3.11 million enrollees.
National Capital Region or Metro Manila followed with 2.35 million enrollees and Region III had 2.06 million.
The DepEd is encouraging students and parents to enroll ahead of the opening of classes.
“We accommodate late enrollees although we don’t encourage them to be late so that class programming can be more efficient, particularly in big schools,” DepEd Assistant Secretary Francis Bringas said.
The Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) urged local government units (LGUs), the Philippine National Police (PNP), and the Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) to support DepEd’s Balik Eskwela 2023 campaign by ensuring a peaceful and orderly class opening on Aug. 29.
“Peace and order are paramount priorities in Balik-Eskwela 2023. To our LGUs and law enforcement units, be vigilant and be on your toes to ensure the safety of our students, parents, and teachers as classes are about to start,” DILG Secretary Benjamin Abalos Jr. said.
Abalos urged LGUs to deploy law and traffic enforcers, barangay police officers, medical personnel, and other force multipliers to ensure a safe school opening.
He also urged the PNP to work with LGUs to increase police visibility within school premises and to establish police help desks near school zones.
Also on Thursday, Senator Sherwin Gatchalian called for the expansion of the voucher system to address the lack of classrooms in public schools.
Only available for Senior High Schools at the moment, the voucher system lets qualified students attend classes in private schools which will receive a subsidy.
Gatchalian, who chairs the Senate committee on basic education, said the voucher system should be expanded to cover learners from Kindergarten to Grade 6 to spare the government from allocating more resources to build classrooms.
“If you have a well-designed voucher system that is properly implemented, you won’t need to build more classrooms. You give the voucher to the student, and the student goes to the nearest, least congested school,” Gatchalian said.
Aside from tapping private schools’ excess capacities, the voucher system could also help private schools recover from a drop in enrollment during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Data from the DepEd and the Learner Information System show that from the pre-pandemic level of 4.3 million in School Year (SY) 2019-2020, enrollment in private schools is down to 3.62 million for SY 2022-2023, a decline of 16 percent.
Meanwhile, 32 percent (12,524) of 39,186 schools for Kindergarten to Grade 6 have congested classrooms.
Bringas said the agency faces a backlog of around 159,000 classrooms nationwide, which would require a budget of P397 billion.
Under the 2024 proposed national budget, however, only P10 billion was allocated to the DepEd for the construction of 7,100 classrooms.
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