DepEd bares education challenges in Eastern Visayas

PALO, Leyte, May 5  -- Decreasing enrollment, malnourished learners, funding constraints, and classroom congestions are among the immediate concerns confronting the Department of Education (DepEd) in the Eastern Visayas region.

The department’s field offices in six provinces and seven cities in the region have listed 19 immediate concerns that should be addressed as they prepare for the opening of the new school year on June 4, DepEd Regional Director Ramir Uytico said Friday.

Specifically, these issues include fluctuating net enrollment rate in the elementary level, high dropout rate, limited access to secondary schools in rural areas, underweight children, lack of instituted system to track student participation, and operating internet shops near campuses.

“In Tacloban City, there is congestion of classes in most of the schools in the northern villages due to the transfer of residents from the city proper to the relocation sites,” Uytico said during the 2018 Regional Road Show for Partnerships in Education at the Leyte Academic Center here.

Other concerns are the lack of community learning centers, lack of alternative learning system teachers, low national achievement test performance, teachers teaching subjects that they did not major in, insufficient school days due to other activities for teachers, inadequate budget, absence of standard monitoring tools for project implementation, and lack of non-teaching staff.

One of the major strategic interventions to be undertaken to address these challenges is the intensified implementation of school banner projects in all the 13 divisions, said Uytico.

In 2016, the DepEd launched Project LEAD (Lead, Empower and Achieve through Data-Driven Decisions), a regional-initiated project pursuant to Republic Act No. 9155 or the Governance of Basic Education Act of 2001.

The initiative highlights the role of school leaders in localizing basic education policy and principles into projects and services that would fit and address the needs of school community.

“DepEd Region 8 (Eastern Visayas), through this project, would like to move from the old bureaucratic practice of top-to-bottom management to creative and innovative leadership that emphasizes empowerment, create the trend of abandoning passive compliance in favor of active, contextualized implementation and strengthen the path for critical yet proactive thinking rather than indifference,” said Uytico.

Through Project LEAD, the 13 schools division offices and each school in the region came up with their own banner projects.

In the past school year, the region had 1.15 million students enrolled in 4,561 state-run schools in six provinces.

During Friday’s road show, DepEd forged 38 partnership agreements and solicited PHP200,439,066 worth of donations from various stakeholders.

The activity is a marketing and advocacy event targeting potential partners at the local level to participate in educational endeavors. It showcased the regional and division initiatives for partnerships and best practices in engaging partners. (SQM/With reports from Chanda Mae Dialino & Princess Rosette Cabonegro, OJTs/PNA)