Sad school realities

Last Monday, the opening of the new school year in 46,624 public elementary and high schools nationwide, some 23 million students were expected to troop back to their classrooms, along with 603,500-plus teachers (401,913 in grade school, 201,651 in high school). At the close of the day, the Department of Education and the Philippine National Police declared that the first day of classes was “generally peaceful, safe and secure.”

And so it seemed. While there were protests from progressive groups demanding a halt to the implementation of the K-to-12 program, which will add Grade 11 next year and Grade 12 in 2017 to make for a new 13-year basic education curriculum, no untoward incidents were reported and the day passed rather uneventfully.

In Metro Manila, however, the wretched administrators of the Metro Rail Transit were not about to pass up the chance to ruin the occasion. Only seven trains of MRT 3 were deployed for the whole day, out of the regular 20 that plied the system during peak hours. The scarcity of trains led to even more excruciating waiting time in sweltering stations, the lines often snaking out into open areas under the relentless sun. MRT management said 13 of the trains were out of commission due to malfunctioning air-conditioning units. The wonder, of course, is why all 13 had to go on the blink on the very day they were needed the most to service millions more commuters, mostly parents with kids in tow, trying to get to schools around the metro. Nobody among MRT top honchos knew it was the school opening, and so could have ordered that ailing trains be repaired weeks earlier to be able to accommodate the increased demand?

The government, of course, would not want the MRT glitch that greeted the new school year to be seen as a harbinger of more problems ahead. But that’s a perception that can’t be helped. The MRT/LRT breakdowns—now becoming an alarmingly regular affair, with the latest incident no less than a collision between two trains of the LRT 1 line—are but a manifestation of the haphazard, negligent governance under the Aquino administration, and more so when a wholesale glitch happens on a day long forecast to be extra-busy on the streets that 24,000 cops had to be deployed by the PNP to staff assistance desks near schools. Who was in charge?

At the very least, incidents like this inspire no confidence that the administration is on top of the game as it attempts a momentous reboot of the educational system, beginning this year when it graduates the last batch of four-year high school seniors and gears up for the surge of millions of brand-new Grade 11 students by June 2016. Are the Department of Education and the government ready? The DepEd says it has built 66,813 classrooms from July 2010 to December 2013, with an additional 41,728 proposed to be constructed this year. That number is enough, it says, based on a 1:45 classroom-to-student ratio.

But the cause-oriented Alliance of Concerned Teachers maintains that, contrary to the DepEd’s rosy picture, more than 112,000 classrooms and some 24 million textbooks and teachers’ manuals are still lacking. Reports gathered by the Inquirer yesterday appear to bolster this view. The Batasan Hills National High School, for instance, has only 127 classrooms for a student population of 12,921, which would result in a staggering situation of roughly 100 students crammed into a room. The school’s rudimentary solution for now? Partition some of the classrooms into two, leading to a more cramped, congested environment.

Elsewhere, Eastern Visayas still lacks 287,000 classrooms for more than one million students; in Zamboanga City, of 71,718 chairs needed, only 1,300 have been provided so far, according to division school superintendent Pedro Melchor Natividad. The shortage is so acute that in Ligao West Central School in Albay, the students were told to bring their own chairs. And in Pangasinan, pupils trooping to computer rooms would have found desks bare of desktop computers; some 24 public schools were reportedly stripped of equipment by robbers in January.

Yes—24. How were thieves able to hit that many number of schools in a spree that appeared to have escaped police detection for so long? Like the case of 13 MRT trains uniformly breaking down on the first day of school due to lack of proper care and foresight, that’s the kind of reality on the ground that makes us only more anxious of the days ahead for students of public schools.