EDITORIAL - ‘Deplorable’ performance

Now we can see why there’s a backlog of 165,000 classrooms in the public school system.

Yesterday, while defending the proposed budget for 2026 of the Department of Public Works and Highways before the Senate, Secretary Vince Dizon disclosed that of over 1,700 classrooms targeted for completion this year, the DPWH had finished all of 22 as of this month.

That’s a dismal completion rate of 1.29 percent. Another 882 are under construction, while work on another 882 has not even started, Dizon said. With less than three months left in the year, and holiday breaks ahead, those classrooms are unlikely to be finished.

This shameful performance is by the department that received the lion’s share of the 2025 national budget – an amount higher, even after some token reductions, than the allotment for the entire education sector.

During the budget deliberations, thieves in Congress also creatively redefined the education sector to include learning institutions that should have fallen under other executive departments, such as the Philippine Military Academy and Philippine National Police Academy. Even then, the education budget was still smaller than the allotment for the DPWH, in clear violation of the Constitution.

Details that continue to emerge on the corruption rackets in the DPWH have raised fears that classroom projects are also heavily tainted with graft. Sen. Bam Aquino noted that experts have estimated the cost of a high-quality classroom at P2 million, but the DPWH price is P3 million.

Aquino, who has a lower figure of 146,000 for the classroom backlog, warned that at the current performance rate of the DPWH, the backlog could balloon to 200,000 by 2028.

Overpricing, cost cutting to make way for kickbacks, collecting funds for projects that are never carried out, and even proposing the same projects for more funding in subsequent budget rounds are just among the atrocious corruption schemes unearthed in the DPWH.

Short of going along with proposals for the abolition of the DPWH, the department will be seeing hefty cuts in its budget allotment for 2026. There are moves to get classroom construction out of its hands, with local government units taking over the task.

But authorities should also impose sanctions on those responsible for what Dizon described as the “deplorable” implementation of classroom projects for this year. Allowing the negligent, incompetent or corrupt to go unpunished will be just as deplorable.