by Camille Joyce M. Lisay and Arra B. Francia
At most 400,000 Grade 10 students will be dropping out from school because of the Senior High School curriculum included in the K-12 program, according to youth group Kabataan Partylist.
The record-high drop-out rate is an estimate based on the 1.5 million students who finished Grade 10 in March 2016. Of this number, only 1.1 million were expected to pursue senior high, or the additional two years mandated by the implementation of the K-12 program.
“[The Department of Education] is intent in downplaying the dire ramifications of the K-12 program. The stubborn implementation of K to 12 has resulted to up to 400,000 drop outs,” said Kabataan Partylist Representative Sarah Elago in a statement.
More than 1.04 million students have already enrolled in SHS as of June 18, according to DepEd’s database called Learner Information System (LIS). A total of 1409 out of the 10,934 senior high schools have yet to transmit their enrolment records to the LIS.
Despite the wide gap in the number of students enrolled and the actual number of Grade 10 students, DepEd Secretary called June 13 as the “best school opening thus far,” drawing flak from student groups.
“It is despicable that our government is trying to hide the fact that K-12 has worsened the decade-old woes of our education system. They insist that this is the best school opening when in reality, around a million students were forced to drop out,” JP Rosos of League of Filipino Students said.
The SHS program has four tracks: academic, technical-vocational livelihood (TVL), sports, and arts and design. So far, 628,000 students have taken the academic track, 402,000 for TVL, 2,800 have enrolled in arts and design, and 1,600 have chosen the sports track. The old four-year high school program will now be called junior high to accommodate changes in the curriculum.
Out of the existing 8,000 public junior high schools in the country, only 5,700 will be offering SHS. Students who cannot be accommodated by the public school system have been encouraged to enter private schools through the DepEd’s SHS voucher program.
The P12 billion voucher program grants students checks ranging from P8750 to P22500. This figure is a far cry from Kabataan Partylist’s estimate of the additional expenses for SHS, pegged at P100, 000 to P200, 000 for every student.
“The low enrollment in SHS only shows how great a burden K-12 is for students and their families. Imagine a minimum wage earner suddenly facing the problem of enrolling his or her child to a private school because of the way K-12 was set up,” said Elago.
The pilot implementation of the K12 curriculum overlaps with President-elect Rodrigo Duterte’s first year in office. While recognizing the challenges in implementing the program, Duterte has announced that he will continue its program.
Reiterating their call to suspend the implementation of K12, youth groups staged nationwide protests on June 13, including in front of the DepEd Office in Pasig City, UP Diliman, Polytechnic University of the Philippines and other universities during the opening of classes.
“We intend to summon DepEd to Congress to assess the situation, with the end view of discontinuing this program that has proven to be nothing but a burden for many Filipino families,” added Elago.
The post ‘K12 prompts 27 percent dropout rate’ appeared first on Philippine Collegian.