THE Department of Education on Sunday admitted that there remain “challenges” in meeting the demand for classrooms as around 27.7-million public Kinder to Grade 12 students troop back to school today (Monday).
“We must admit that there are some in thickly-populated areas. We do have classroom—not shortage but challenges,” Education Undersecretary Jesus Mateo said in a television interview.
“You have a limited space and you cannot build a multi-story building if you have an existing building there,” he added.
ACT Teachers Rep. Antonio Tinio said the same old problems will still welcome the returning students.
“I think when classes open today, we will still experience the same old problems, such as teacher and classroom shortage. That will continue to hound us. We will see a bigger class size and some other concerns,” he said.
Tinio said there was still a shortage of about 18,000 classrooms in Metro Manila alone, resulting in a ratio of one teacher to 50 to 60 students.
“That figure is too big. If we compare ourselves to other countries, our teacher-student ratio is relatively high. Here in the National Capital Region, there is classroom shortage because there is no more space to build classrooms,” he added.
Meanwhile, in line with DepEd’s nationwide campaign to prepare public school facilities for the opening of the school year, more than 3,000 employees of SM have joined the Brigada Eskwela 2018.
SM Prime Holdings Inc. employees from across the country volunteered to participate in the said activity, assisting in repairing damaged chairs and tables and repainting school walls and other school facilities.
Brigada Eskwela, also called as the National Schools Maintenance Week, is a project by DepEd that encourages members of the community to share their time and skills in preparing the schools to ensure a clean and safe learning environment for the students.
In 2017, SM employee volunteers cleaned up 61 public elementary schools. This year, they worked in 67 schools, helping around 110,000 public school students to enjoy a conducive learning environment.