Students enrolled in state universities and colleges in areas hit by Super Typhoon “Yolanda” will each receive P5,000, three years after “Yolanda” ravaged parts of Visayas in 2013, an official of the Commission on Higher Education said Tuesday.
“An additional P5,000 financial assistance will be given to students enrolled in Yolanda-affected areas,” CHED commissioner Prospero de Vera III said in a Palace news briefing.
De Vera said the funds were sourced from the P540-million “residual money from Yolanda funds that were not utilized in 2016.”
“It is a one-time cash assistance that is long overdue but we want to make sure we will expedite the release,” he said.
Students should apply at their respective universities in order to avail of the educational grant, De Vera said.
“The students will apply in the school because the school has the records and the school will be able to check if they are students from Yolanda-affected areas. And then the cash assistance will be given by the school to the students.”
The money is expected to be disbursed by the universities to students starting this month, he added.
The super typhoon that was considered as one of the strongest displaced thousands of Filipinos and left more than 7,000 dead after battering the country in November 2013.
In the same news briefing, De Vera said they will be issuing in the next couple of days “an advisory to all universities to immediately accept students coming from Marawi-affected areas if they want to transfer.”
“This is like what we did in the case of ‘Yolanda,’ we issued an advisory to the schools that they should accept transferees even with incomplete records. Immediately accept them in light of the problem that we are encountering in Marawi, so that their records can come later,” he said.
The commission en banc has already approved this particular advisory, he added.
De Vera likewise said that there won’t be any problems on the opening of classes for higher education institutions located in Marawi, most of which are set to open by August this year.
“There’s no big problem right now in terms of disruption in terms of the opening of classes,” he said.
“We will provide the necessary assistance as needed if there are problems that they encounter as far as their students are concerned,” he added.