No classroom shortage despite budget cut — DepEd

There will be no classroom shortage next year despite an impending budget cut on the government’s school building program, according to the Department of Education.

DepEd Undersecretary for administration Alain del Pascua said 81,630 classrooms are currently under construction and are expected to be delivered by the end of next year.

“It’s to give a breather to DepEd and (the Department of Public Works and Highways) on the number of constructions that we are now doing,” he said.

“By the end of December 2019, we will have about 80,000 new classrooms built, which will come from the (projects) that were started since 2014,” he added.

Several groups have expressed concern over the low allocation for the school building program in the proposed 2019 budget.

Instead of the proposed P116 billion to fund the construction of over 40,000 classrooms, the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) proposed only a P10.2 billion, enough for about 4,000 classrooms.

Education Undersecretary for finance Annalyn Sevilla explained that the reduction was due to the cash-based budgeting system that requires project delivery within one year.

She said those that were approved by the DBM are projects that are ready for implementation.

Sevilla noted that various preparatory activities like soil testing and securing of permits have to be conducted before construction can begin.

She said the classroom projects not included in DBM’s proposal were those not yet deemed implemented.

“We have a fund that we can tap for preparatory activities like pre-detailed engineering, which means cleaning up of necessary preliminary works such as design, costing and validation,” she said.

Sevilla said funding for the classrooms not covered by the 2019 budget will be included in the 2020 proposal, stressing that they will make sure that these are already implementation-ready when the new budget season begins.