Accessible education for all

Maria Elena G. dela Cruz

OVER the years, education has been addressing some of the issues regarding social inequity and well-being. The Department of Education has been very engrossed with making education accessible for all Filipinos.

According to the Department, poverty is one of the prevailing issues that resulted in the increase of out-of-school youths in the country. This has resulted in the lack of interest in school, particularly among male learners, who opted to work at an early age.

For females, one of the deciding factors in dropping out is early marriage or pregnancy. Third on the list is the high cost of education.

In light of these issues of poverty and dropping out, the DepEd is providing free or highly subsidized basic education to 27,216,398 learners in public and private schools nationwide.

Access to quality basic education is equally important, which the Department has been continuously providing.

The agency has been successful in bringing back to the fold of formal education many of learners, though there are still hundreds and thousands of learners out there who don’t have access to education.

With education as a major instrument for development and getting out of poverty, the Alternative Learning System (ALS) is a second-chance program for out-ofschool youths and adults - a parallel learning system that provides viable alternative to the existing formal education instructions.

The Last Mile Schools Program, meantime, targets hard-to-reach and conflictstricken areas in the country. This program reaches out to and closes the gap between Geographically Isolated, Disadvantaged and Conflict-Affected (GIDCA) areas to their counterparts in urban centers. These areas are provided with unhampered and equal access to quality-basic education.

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The author is Teacher III at Sta. Maria National High School, Bunducan,

Bagbaguin, Bulacan