DepEd: Smooth school opening

MANILA, Philippines – Education Secretary Jesli Lapus said yesterday’s opening of classes for more than 20 million public elementary and high school students nationwide was smooth and orderly.

Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Director General Avelino Razon Jr., on the other hand, emphasized that the deployment of policemen in the vicinity of schools will continue for at least another week to ensure the safety of students.

Lapus earlier visited Batasan Hills National High school in Quezon City and the Highway Hills Integrated School in Mandaluyong City to monitor the start of classes.

He said public school students trooped back to schools where there were mostly single shift classes, a textbook each for the core subjects for every student, and an average class size of 45.

“About 97 percent of all our public schools throughout the country are on single shifts,” Lapus said.

He said Batasan Hills National High School was a prime example of the improved conditions in public schools, emphasizing that the school was on three-shift school days just last year.

“Now, the school has only two shifts. This, despite the continued rise in the population of the students,” Lapus said.

He said the achievement was made possible by efforts of DepEd as well as the help of the local government unit in Quezon City headed by Mayor Feliciano Belmonte.

In the case of Highway Hills Integrated School, Lapus said students raised their average score in the recent National Achievement Test from last year’s performance.

“We are making strides in our determined push to raise the quality of education in our public schools,” Lapus said.

He said the DepEd’s aggressive information dissemination campaign regarding the “no collection of fees” policy among DepEd division and regional officers and school principals resulted in fewer complaints of illegal fee collections, the perennial complaint in previous years’ opening of classes.

“We are also happy to note that here in our Action Center, we had received fewer complaints, inquiries and requests compared to last year. In our summary here, we had almost 40 percent reduction,” Lapus said.

He said DepEd is vigorously looking into all complaints received by the Action Center regarding reported violations of the “no collection policy.”

“The cases were all looked into, the involved officials reprimanded, and in cases where money was collected, we ordered a refund,” Lapus said.

DepEd figures showed that there were some 4,000 classrooms built in late 2007 up to the early part of 2008, bringing the total number of classrooms in public schools all over the country from 417,000 in 2007 to 421,034 for this school year.

More than 10,000 teachers were hired, thus improving the number of teachers in public schools from last year’s 470,000 to 480,433 this school year.

Some two million textbooks were also reportedly purchased in procurements made last year and early this year, hiking the number of textbooks available for use by students from 84 million to 86.20 million.

DepEd had also procured more chairs with the current inventory of chairs now placed at 15.23 million from last year’s 14 million.

Peaceful and orderly

Taking the cue from the Education Department, the National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO) deployed 4,000 personnel from the five Police Districts to conduct foot, mobile and police visibility patrols in strategic areas within the vicinity of schools in Metro Manila.

According to Razon, all PNP Regional Offices and National Support Units were given specific tasks and coordinating instructions for the PNP units concerned under Oplan Balik Paaralan.

The PNP chief has already given all the Regional Directors the discretionary authority to raise alert levels as they see fit to effectively implement Oplan Balik Paaralan.   – Cecille Suerte Felipe