Senator Sherwin Gatchalian on Monday vowed to ensure there would be sufficient funding for the Senior High School Voucher Program (SHS-VP) to prevent the government’s debt to private schools from accumulating and risk affecting beneficiaries of the program.
Gatchalian, who chairs the Senate Committee on Basic Education, Arts and Culture noted that while the Department of Education (DepEd) has proposed a P25-billion budget for the SHS-VP in 2022, only P16.5-billion has been appropriated for it under the National Expenditure Program (NEP), or a deficit of almost P9-billion.
Under the Senate finance committee report on the proposed 2022 national budget, P5-billion in unprogrammed appropriations was added to the P16.5-billion budget for SHS-VP.
SHS-VP is a financial assistance program that subsidizes qualified senior high school students in the form of vouchers. Learners come from participating private or non-DepEd public senior high schools.
Gatchalian said the SHS-VP is a good mechanism to revive ailing private schools since most of these institutions have ben devastated by the pandemic.
He warned that shortfall in the SHS financial assistance program would also mean a lesser number of beneficiaries that can avail of the program.
Gatchalian noted that the government currently owes P35-billion to private schools under the SHS-VP and if their budget remains insufficient, DepEd’s debt to private schools will continue to balloon.
“I am just concerned with the SHS-VP next year because if we cannot fund the P9-billion and the amount being approved under the unprogrammed funds, the debt or what we owe to the private schools will always increase every year and this will never end,” Gatchalian said in a statement.
“If we continue to have a shortfall, this will increase over time and we will never be able to catch up at one point,” he added.
To address the shotfall, Gatchalian proposed to realign part of the P15-billion allocated to Flexible Learning Options (FLOs). A bulk of the budget mainly goes to the printing of self-learning modules (SLMs).
The senator said he is already anticipating less dependence on self-learning modules in light of the resumption of face-to-face classes.