The start of classes has been twice delayed, and officials are now readying a distance learning program for the 24.35 million children who did enroll for basic education this year.
The DepEd on Wednesday said it would accept late enrollees until November as long as they could attend 80 percent of the total class days for the school year.
“Realistically, we run the risk of losing a generation that we really need to recover,” said Love Basillote, executive director of Philippine Business for Education . “COVID-19 is not just this year. It will really ripple. It’s not just a health-care thing.” The DepEd has acknowledged the scale of the issue, telling senators at a hearing in August that it was discussing learning interventions for the unenrolled, which stood at 4 million at the time.
PHONE SHARING Eleven-year-old Mary Grace Solomon shares a cell phone with her younger siblings, Mary Kris, Mateo and Mary Rose, which they will use for distance learning inside their one-room home in Barangay Muntindilaw, Antipolo City. They are a little more fortunate than 3 million students who decided to quit school due to poverty. Their mother, Robelyn Solomon, said the phone was bought with their father’s loan from Pag-Ibig ahead of the Oct. 5 opening of classes.
But the whopping enrollment rate seen in 2019 had been years in the making. It even prompted Briones to declare then that the DepEd could finally shift its focus from increasing access to education to addressing the quality of education itself. “Whether we like it or not, quality of education depends on the number of students per classroom,” Buenviaje said. “If before, teachers handled 40-60 students and now, even online if it reaches 70-80 in a class, the quality is compromised.”
Because well-off pupils are likelier to find ways to continue learning, the millions who will miss this school year are cut from the cloth of society’s most vulnerable: the children most in need of the safety net an education can provide.
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