Over 19.5 mil­lion en­roll for com­ing school year

The De­part­ment of Ed­u­ca­tion (DepEd) on Mon­day con­firmed over 19.5 mil­lion learn­ers en­rolled in both pub­lic and pri­vate schools na­tion­wide for the up­com­ing school year which opens Au­gust 24.

Data from DepEd showed that as of 8 a.m. of July 13, the to­tal num­ber of en­rollees for school year (SY) 2020-2021 has reached 19, 534, 836 na­tion­wide for Kinder­garten to Grade 12, in­clud­ing Al­ter­na­tive Learn­ing Sys­tem (ALS) and non­graded learn­ers with dis­abil­i­ties. Of the to­tal num­ber of en­rollees, 18,543,788 learn­ers en­rolled in pub­lic schools and 968,154 reg­is­tered in pri­vate schools.

Orig­i­nally, the reg­is­tra­tion pe­riod for this SY was sched­uled from June 1-30 only. How­ever, in a bid to ac­com­mo­date more learn­ers, DepEd ex­tended the en­roll­ment pe­riod un­til July 15.

Re­mote en­roll­ment sys­tem was also im­ple­mented due to the COVID19 sit­u­a­tion in the coun­try.

Lower en­roll­ment tar­get Even be­fore the en­roll­ment pe­riod was an­nounced, DepEd had al­ready an­tic­i­pated a de­crease in par­tic­i­pa­tion rate, es­pe­cially in pri­vate schools peg­ging it at around 80 per­cent of last year's 27 mil­lion learn­ers.

Cur­rent data showed there are 1,297,737 learn­ers en­rolled in Kinder­garten; 9,664,897 in Ele­men­tary; 6,187,967 in Ju­nior High School (JHS); and 2,101,375 in Se­nior High School (SHS).

In­cluded in the lat­est en­roll­ment data are the 50,367 learn­ers with dis­abil­i­ties and 232,493 un­der the ALS.

In SY 2019-2020, there were 27,030,391 learn­ers en­rolled from Kin­der to Grade 12 and 759,723 are in the ALS pro­gram. 

There were 22,572,923 en­rollees in pub­lic schools and 4,203,676 in pri­vate schools.

This year’s en­roll­ment had teach­ers or class ad­vis­ers tak­ing the lead in call­ing their stu­dents from Grade 1 to Grade 12 last year to get their in­for­ma­tion and place it on the Learner In­for­ma­tion Sys­tem (LIS).