A group of education workers on Saturday, March 18, urged the administration of President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. to refocus its infrastructure program towards social services infrastructure --- especially the construction of classrooms in public schools. The Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Philippines said this in response to the push of the Department of Education (DepEd) to secure foreign and private funding to address the classroom shortage in the country’s public schools. ACT Chairperson Vladimer Quetua noted that the Build Better More (BBM) infrastructure program of the Marcos government has P1.2 trillion in funding in the 2023 budget but classroom construction was only given P15.6 billion. “Why not ensure that P100 billion of the infrastructure budget be allocated to classroom building to decisively resolve the classroom shortage?” he said. For ACT, there is “clear misprioritization” when the government intends to build grandiose bridges, airports, and sea ports “while it has no plans and fund allocation to resolve” the 165,000 classroom shortage that troubles 20 percent of the learner population. Queta pointed with President Marcos and Vice President Duterte pledging their commitment to education recovery in the DepEd’s Basic Education Report last January, the challenge before them is to substantially increase the education budget from the current 3.6 percent to the ideal six percent equivalent of the gross domestic product (GDP). “Once this is done, we are sure that classroom shortage can be decisively resolved and we can finally take the right path out of the learning crisis that we are currently suffering from,” Quetua said.