Just around half of DepEd’s target number of classrooms built in 2023

Duterte said during her second DepEd Basic Education Report (BER) that the education department constructed 3,673 new classrooms in 2023.

This represents just 58% of DepEd’s target number of new classrooms in 2023 (6,379), which Duterte announced during last year’s BER and which Marcos announced in his second State of the Nation Address.

Duterte said on Thursday that over 6,200 classrooms are in “various stages of construction” while 800 others are still in the procurement stage.

The vice president added that the department aims to finish building at least 4,000 classrooms “by the end of the first semester of 2024.”

Duterte did not mention how much progress DepEd has made in reducing average class sizes nationwide — a talking point that triggered a word war with a progressive teachers’ group last year that criticized the department’s efforts to address classroom shortages.

Even as both Marcos and Duterte have expressed the need to expand school infrastructure, the government lowered its target number of new classrooms for 2024 to 1,628, according to 2024 National Expenditure Program documents.

A month before the start of the school year or in August 2023, DepEd Assistant Secretary Francis Bringas said that public schools were short of around 159,000 classrooms, which would require at least P397 billion.

Progress not enough — Sara 

“We have made progress, but clearly, this is not enough,” Duterte said on Thursday.

“DepEd is committed to working with the Department of Public Works and Highways, to improve proper coordination and the Special Allotment Release Order request process so that we can build more and build faster,” she added.

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The vice president added that the department will focus on improving the infrastructure in schools that have makeshift or temporary classrooms and calamity-stricken areas with many unfunded calamity-damaged school buildings.

DepEd will also build medium-rise school buildings in priority areas with high classroom shortages but with limited buildable space.

Last year, Duterte and the Alliance of Concerned Teachers traded barbs over the group’s proposal for DepEd to allocate at least P100 billion annually for classroom construction to shrink class sizes to a manageable level.

DepEd was given P17 billion to construct new school buildings in the 2024 budget, up from the previous year’s P15.6 billion. — Cristina Chi