‘I am not supposed to be here’
ON Sept. 11, 2019, I was supposed to be in a meeting of the for Tertiary Education Act (UniFAST) board, representing the chairman of the Coordinating Council of Private Educational Associations (Cocopea) in the morning and at the PEAC-Fund Assistance to Private Education meeting in the afternoon. I knew that I had accepted an invitation to be the commencement speaker at the senior high school (SHS) commencement exercises at the Sisters of Mary SchoolBoys Town and Girls Town in Cebu, scheduled on the same date. I had no choice but to cancel it over the pleas of the Sisters to grace their graduation. But on September 10, I suddenly got the information that the UniFAST meeting had been canceled, and that somebody had volunteered to attend the PEAC meeting in my stead. At 2 a.m. of September 11, I found myself driving to the airport to catch the 3:50
At the airport, I was still thinking hard about the news report concerning the budget cuts facing the Department of Education’s (DepEd’s) Educational Service Contracting (ESC) and SHS voucher program. I was worried
As soon as I reached the Sisters of Mary School-Girls Town, I was intro
well-kept facility. A few minutes into the conversation with the school administrators, I was informed that the Catholic school caters to around 3,000 students from the poorest of the poor families who are ESC and SHS voucher recipients. Education there is free and the school provides students with uniforms and meals from its other fund-raising activities. That day, there would be more than 1,000 SHS graduates who were voucher recipients.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” I told myself. But at that point I knew why I was there — to tell our government that somewhere in this little town in Cebu, a private Catholic mission school provides quality education to thousands of poor students through the DepEd’s SHS voucher program.
Sisters of Mary School is just one of the 4,000 private schools implementing the SHS voucher program catering to around 1 million voucher recipients all over the country.
Contrary to the claims of the representative of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers, the SHS subsidy is a form of assistance to students and
of the private schools.
When private schools participate in the government’s duty to provide education, they relieve the government of the cost and burden of hiring more teachers
and building more classrooms and facilities in the public schools, and allow for a diversity of schools that students may choose from.
In School Year 2018- 2019, national data show that private schools account for 44 percent of the total SHS enrollment with over a million voucher recipients scattered in 4,000 private senior high schools all over the country. The average tuition in these participating schools is only P24,000 per year.
Please help me in asking the Senate not to allow the reduction in the annual budget of DepEd for government assistance to students, especially the number of slots for SHS vouchers. Let us help keep the hopes for the millions of Filipino students who otherwise cannot afford to be in school and can no longer be accommodated in the public school system. Let us support public-private partnership (PPP) in education and continue to push for complementarity in the delivery of education.
Both ESC and the SHS voucher subsidies are grounded on the principle of PPP and on the constitutional principle of complementarity, in recognition of the private education sector as a key partner in the delivery of accessible and quality basic education. The Manila Times,