A party-list lawmaker questioned on Friday the P23.9-billion allotment for the implementation of the Senior High School (SHS) voucher program for private schools, since public funds may only end up in the coffers of private educational institutions.
During the congressional deliberation on the Department of Education’s proposed budget for 2017, Kabataan Partylist Rep. Sarah Elago asked Secretary Leonor Briones why there was a large disparity between funding for SHS vouchers in private and public senior high schools.
Of the P34.6 billion allotted under DepEd’s “assistance to students and teachers” program for 2017, Elago said, P23.9 billion are earmarked for the implementation of the SHS voucher program in private schools, private higher education institutions and private technical vocational institutions.
Meanwhile, only P1.3 billion are set aside for the implementation of the SHS voucher program for “non-DepEd” public schools, which include state and local colleges and universities, and public technical vocational institutions.
The SHS voucher system is a program implemented by DepEd to partially pay for the enrollment of students in senior high school under the K-12 program.
“The funding for the implementation of the K-12 program has been highly criticized in the past for its large emphasis on subsidizing private schools. The manner in which the budget for the SHS voucher program is designed confirms these observations,” Elago said.
“In a way, we can consider this allotment for private senior high schools as ‘sure profits’ for them, again confirming fears that DepEd might have actually designed the full implementation of the K-12 Program in a manner that will guarantee greater profit for school owners. This is one of the reasons why we continue to call for the junking of the K-12 program,” the lawmaker stressed.
Similarly, Elago also urged Briones to investigate reports of ghost beneficiaries under DepEd’s “Education Service Contracting” (ESC) program for private junior high schools, which has a P9.5-billion budget for 2017.
The ESC program partially subsidizes the tuition of eligible students enrolled in private high schools, as part of the government’s effort to “decongest public schools.”
During the congressional deliberation, Elago noted a 2013 Commission on Audit report which questioned the Private Education Assistance Committee’s (PEAC) failure to submit the list of grantees under the ESC program, which it manages.
“Under such shady mechanism, it is easy for schools to pad and fake its list of beneficiaries to accumulate more profits using public funds,” Elago said.
“We note that these anomalies happened before Secretary Briones was appointed to the education department. Now, we would like to ask the good secretary to probe these reports, as it involves huge sums from the public coffers,” she said.