By Chito Chavez Progressive youth group Kabataan Partylist Laguna (KPL) on Tuesday said students are overworked and neglected under the government’s K-12 educational program. The claim came at the heels of the group’s survey where the respondent students aired that the K-12 is "doing more harm than good to the students taking it." In a recent, KPL Laguna discussed the results of the survey, which was sent to senior high school and college students from all over the province. The survey asked respondents to assess the K-12 program on factors such as workload, job-readiness, quality of education, organizational and academic freedom, and impact on physical and mental health. Based on the results, the K-12 program overworks students without seeing any real gains, while simultaneously putting undue focus on science and technology. KPL Chairperson Justin Umali said most students under the K-12 program feel their workload is not evenly distributed and that the time they spend in school is not conducive to their education. Students on the average spend nine hours per day on academics, leaving little time for them to engage in extracurricular activities, homework, rest, leisure, and other similar essentials. On the quality of education, the group said 45.7 percent of all respondents said they are not receiving quality education. The group noted “a large factor to this was the lack of adequate facilities, which was true for most respondents who didn't receive quality education.” The KPL-supervised survey indicated that almost half of the respondents felt that schools gave unequal focus to science and technology subjects while neglecting other strands such as humanities, arts, and general academics. In the survey, 83 percent of the respondents said they were not job ready, contrary to K-12's assertion that the goal was to make graduates "globally competitive and ready for the workplace." “Students also confided that a majority of their mental health was affected by the K-12 program, while also stating that the available treatment methods offered by schools are inadequate to their needs or that they feel uncomfortable availing them,” the KPL survey noted. Overall, the group disclosed that 79 percent of the respondents felt the K-12 program should be revised, with some even clamoring for the K-12 program to be scrapped entirely. Other concerns fielded by students include lack of proper organizational life, the rising cost of tuition and other fees, lack of qualified teachers, and the fact that courses taken during K-12 are not credited in college. "These results are only telling us what we already know - the K-12 Program is deeply flawed and has failed to meet its objectives," Umali said. "Lawmakers have fielded an educational program that was nothing more than an experiment and it has failed a generation of youth." Umali added "the extra two years of K-12 have become a burden not just to the students but to their parents as well". He also noted the rising cost of study makes quality education even harder to reach than before. “And given K-12's current performance, we have no other choice but to give it a failing grade," he noted. The group has called on school administrators to have a discussion on the educational system, adding it currently plans to seek a dialogue with DepEd.