The Department of Education (DepEd) said on Tuesday that addressing the country’s educational woes, including the shortage of 165,000 classrooms, requires a multi-sectoral approach.
“Education isn’t just the responsibility of faculties or teachers alone,” Education Secretary Juan Edgardo “Sonny” M. Angara told reporters in Filipino during an interview.
“Even the families, communities, and the barangays should be involved in raising and educating the youth,” he added.
On average, Mr. Angara said that the department builds around 6,000 recent classrooms annually.
“We are going to begin constructing in areas that need it essentially the most, which are frequently cities in Region 4A,” Mr. Angara said in a separate interview in the course of the launch of DepEd’s Quality Basic Education Development Plan (QBEDP).
“Those areas are overpopulated, which is why there’s a double to triple shift,” he added.
During President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr.’s fourth State of the Nation Address (SONA), he said that the federal government plans to construct 40,000 recent classrooms by 2028 through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs).
To assist construct more classrooms across the country and teach core Filipino values to children through books, a partnership between the DepEd, Jollibee, and Adarna House was launched on Tuesday.
Under the partnership, P5 from every purchase of a “Kids Values Meal” will go to the Jollibee Group Foundation’s Classroom Constructing Project, which goals to donate Joy Learning Centers across various locations nationwide by 2028.
“I believe it’s very essential for corporations comparable to Jollibee, to share the common vision of helping raise the following generation of Filipinos who are usually not just smart but additionally filled with values,” Dorothy-Dee Ching, vp for marketing at Jollibee, told BusinessWorld on the sidelines of the event.
“I believe it’s an ideal partnership that’s public-private, in order that we may help our nation move forward,” she added.
Doubling the hassle
In response to former DepEd Secretary Armin B. Luistro, the federal government must construct at the very least 25,000 learning facilities annually to exchange those which can be damaged and unusable.
“Yearly you needed to construct like 25,000 classrooms to exchange the ten to 12-year-old classrooms,” he told BusinessWorld in an interview.
Mr. Luistro said that in his term because the department chief, that they had to double their efforts in constructing classrooms to meet up with the backlog. “In the course of the six-year term, we were constructing 84 classrooms a day.”
“It’s not all DepEd. The LGUs (local government unit) helped including the private sector, and even the budget of PAGCOR (Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation) was given to DepEd only to construct classrooms,” he added. – Almira Louise S. Martinez