PUERTO PRINCESA CITY, Palawan — An estimated 8,844 students are expected to be the first batch of graduates this year of the senior high school of the government’s “K to 12 Program” despite delays in the construction of additional classrooms for their use.
The number comes from a total of 79 public and 10 private schools in Palawan with combined 477 functional classrooms, said Thursday by DepEd-Palawan Assistant Division Superintendent Rose Vicente during a Kapihan forum by the Philippine Information Agency (PIA).
“I could say we are very successful in the implementation of the K12 except for some difficulties encountered in the number of classroom buildings for them. We have the budget, but the completion of building constructions is slow,” she said.
The strain is said to be because the province has distant island municipalities where it is hard to transport construction materials.
Many schools are also located on properties that are not titled and only covered by tax declarations, and construction aggregates are difficult to source.
DepEd-Palawan Division Engineer Jocelyn Rivas said that because of these, the supposed construction of 349 and 212 classrooms for 2014 and 2016, respectively, suffered a 20 percent setback each.
For 2016, ongoing construction of multi-storey buildings for 609 classrooms is only 80 percent completed due to problems in aggregates.
Engr. Christian Lareza, also of DepEd-Palawan, said the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) is strict in issuing permits for aggregates.
“Add to these is that the DENR sometimes has a problem issuing permits for the aggregates,” he said.
Vicente said for Palawan to provide quality senior high education, the ratio should only be 45 students per classroom. If a school has 100 enrollees, the classrooms should not be less than three.
There are currently 19,510 senior high students in the province, which is expected to increase when junior high graduates enroll.
“But we have more than enough. In fact, we have schools included in their plans more classrooms for future senior high students. When all these classrooms are completed, we won’t have problems anymore,” Vicente said.
She added they cannot give assurance on the perfection of the K to 12 implementation in the province.
However, the percentage of senior high enrollees has been good since last year.
“In terms of implementation, the percentage is higher on those coming on to senior high. In fact, we have out-of-school-youths (OSY) who went back because of senior high,” she added.
Since the OSYs cannot go back to college, they enroll in senior high to take up some of the strands under the K to 12 tracks, like the Technical Vocational Livelihood (TVL).
“K12 has a good effect. I visited several schools, an example of which is Manamoc, Cuyo, and the immersion of their TVL enrollees is in the first-class resort of Amanpulo. And we are glad to inform you that some have already been absorbed to work in this resort,” she stated. (Celeste Anna Formoso/PNA)
