Like his fellow Cabinet officials, Department of Education (DepEd) Secretary Bro.Armin Luistro is ready to show to the public how his agency used the almost P4 billion augmentation funds that it received out of the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP). Bro.Armin disclosed all these funds from DAP from 2011 to 2013 that DepEd got were spent for the additional 4,000 classrooms in public elementary and high schools all over the country.
And like his fellow department secretaries, he did not ask the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) headed by Secretary Florencio “Butch” Abad where the funds came from. Bro.Armin was only more than happy to have the funds to build these classrooms built where these are most needed.
Over luncheon meeting with editors from various media outlets the other day, the DepEd Secretary was forthright in his thoughts about the raging controversy over DAP. Bro.Armin, who was the president of De La Salle University before he joined the government, did not even need any prodding to talk about DAP that has gotten President Benigno “Noy” Aquino III into trouble with the Supreme Court (SC).
There should have been no problem on how DepEd used its DAP, with these public funds going to the construction of additional classrooms.
Per Bro.Armin’s accounting, the DAP-funded classrooms are on top of the 20,000 classrooms that DepEd will put up for school year 2013-2014. This is to accommodate the projected number of students enrolling under the DepEd’s K-to-12 program, or the additional kindergarten and senior year in high school. He, however, could not say how many are already being used but cited these classrooms are in various stages of construction.
But what complicated things were how the DBM sourced the funds for the DAP. The High Court declared the use of DAP as “unconstitutional,” in particular, on the re-channeling of the large chunk of these funds out of the supposed “savings” from other departments and agencies of the government to another. Worse, the DBM even came up with “cross-border” transfer of savings from national government agencies to the legislative branch of government and to constitutional offices.
Bro.Armin admitted DepEd does not generate so much “savings.” On the contrary, it has always been short of funds to meet the growing needs of the public education sector. So whatever savings they generate, he said, are spent to augment DepEd’s other programs that lack funding.
Despite this perennial problem of budgetary constraints, Bro.Armin is proud of the fact that the department has been allocating larger amounts of its annual budget for the school-building program. In fact, out of DepEd’s total budget of P210 billion for this year, as much as P37 billion was allocated for its school-building program. According to him, the former administration provided a measly P2 billion in annual DepEd budget for school-building program in the past that led to huge backlog of classrooms.
Aside from its annual budget for school building, the DepEd is implementing its own Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Schools Infrastructure program. It was a take-off from the PPP of President Aquino who launched this early in his administration.
This is why, he explained, for the past three years of the Aquino administration, the DepEd has been steadily narrowing the gap of classroom shortage and student population in public schools throughout country.
However, force majeure and other unforeseen events like the super typhoon Yolanda that hit the country last year added to the classroom shortage problem. Some 20,000 classrooms in public schools in the five regions worst hit by Yolanda were destroyed. Of this total, 17,000 badly damaged classrooms need repair while the balance of 3,000 classrooms were totally destroyed.
The DepEd Secretary rued many of the students in Leyte and in other Yolanda-struck provinces are still using makeshift “tents” as classrooms. It really takes time to construct permanent school building structures, he pointed out. Hopefully, the construction of the new classrooms is designed to make them not only safer but also more disaster-resilient.
On a positive note, Bro.Armin noted the school system in Yolanda-stricken areas coped better than those in similarly situated disaster-stricken areas in other countries. After one week and a half, he recalled, students and teachers returned to their schools and resumed classes while picking up the pieces of destruction from Yolanda. International studies, he cited, showed schools in Katrina-stricken areas in the United States and the tsunami in Japan resumed classes after more than eight to nine months.
He conceded, however, greater amount of resources are needed to address the other challenges that continue to hound the public education sector in the country. “My frustration is we have the same problems over and over again that crop up every school opening,” Bro.Armin quipped.
With DAP no longer available as a source of additional funds for DepEd’s school-building program, Bro.Armin found a new one. Actually, it is nothing new but it has been provided for under the Local Government Code.
This, he just found out recently from the publication in newspapers of the study done by the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) as part of its tax campaign that focused on local government units (LGUs). Based from the government’s latest TaxWatch campaign advertisement of the BIR, more than half of the 88 cities in the country had spent less than P1,000 per public school pupil last year, or below the average revenue a city could use per student,
In addition to real property tax, cities also collect a one percent levy, known as the Special Education Fund (SEF), to be used for the “operations, maintenance of public schools, construction and repair of school buildings, facilities and equipment, educational research, purchase of books and sports development as required by the Local Government Code.” The SEF is automatically released to the City School Board.
So despite this DAP issue, Bro.Armin exuded great relief to see that things are going smoothly at DepEd after classes for school year 2014-2015 started more than a month ago in all public and private elementary and high schools throughout the country. Will other DAP beneficiaries be able to speak with the same good faith how they used the funds?
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