EDITORIAL - The Luistro formula is wrong
Education assistant secretary Elena Ruiz, who was in Cebu for the launching of Brigada Eskwela, an initiative meant to prepare schools for the opening of classes in June, was reported by GMA-7 as having acknowledged that the lack of classrooms continues to be a problem.
The lack of classrooms is further borne out by the partnership between the Province of Cebu and the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation, Inc. to build 30 four-story school buildings all over the island. Each party is to give P30 million to the joint project.
Both the acknowledgement of Ruiz and the partnership of Cebu Province and RAFI all point to the indubitable fact that there is really a huge lack in classrooms, a lack that the national government has failed to address.
Yet, consider these two facts against the bold pronouncement made by no less than the education secretary himself, Armin Luistro, when he was interviewed recently on ANC by talk show host Karen Davila.
In that interview, Luistro proclaimed without batting an eyelash that there is no actual shortage of classrooms. Luistro said that based on his own personal monitoring and what the DepEd records show, there are in fact more classrooms than the number of actual students.
The incredible thing is that Luistro is absolutely correct. According to Luistro, the shortages are only occurring in the big cities. But in the countrysides, there are many schools that have classrooms but no students.
Wow. The veil has finally been lifted. The mystery has finally been solved. Now we know why the government is not giving the problem the seriousness it deserves. Because all it has to do is look at the records — of school buildings and students — and find nothing wrong.
What Luistro, and this government as a whole, failed to consider is that that is no way of looking at the problem. Just because there may be empty classrooms in, say, Dinagat Island, does not mean you do not have to build more classrooms in Cebu City where the lack occurs.
The only way anyone can justify and reconcile what the records say about the numbers of school buildings and schoolchildren is if we can send the excess students in Cebu City to fill up the empty classrooms in Dinagat. But that is not the way it works. Luistro is dead wrong.
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