The higher budget allocation of the Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education (GASTPE) program received praises from Albay 2nd District Rep. Joey Salceda, who underscored the program’s importance in saving the private education sector from collapse. Also the chair of the House Committee on Ways and Means, the veteran lawmaker lauded the improvements on the program that aim to decongest public secondary schools by providing financial assistance to deserving elementary students who want to pursue their secondary education in private schools. “The GASTPE voucher program used to be paid in two tranches, and was given a budget of around P30 billion in 2022, allocated prior to (Vice President Sara) Duterte taking the helm in DepEd. In Sara’s first year, it is now at P59 billion, paid in a single tranche, so there is no issue of timing in payments,” Salceda said in a statement on Monday, March 20. “That is probably what is saving the private education sector, especially small schools, from collapse,” he added. The lawmaker, who supported Duterte’s candidacy for the vice presidency last May 2022, shared that he originally wanted for her to helm the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), but it seemed her leading the Education agency “is proving to be correct.” “Only under Sara could that level of prioritization for education be achieved,” Salceda said. His comments on the improvements on GASTPE and Executive Order No. 174 s. 2022 on teacher career progression came after the House Committee on Basic Education approved the substitute bill for the career progression system for public school teachers and deliberated on the substitute bill on the expanded GASTPE program. In his statement, he also urged the reconsideration of the voucher program’s disparities in subsidy amount between regions. Salceda also wants the expansion of the GASTPE program to lower grades in basic education. “It appears that beneficiaries of the voucher program from the private education service contracting JHS are able to achieve the highest retention rates in senior high school, while it is the lowest from beneficiaries from public junior high schools,” Salceda explained. He furthered that a case could be made for the GASTPE program to be an end-to-end offer to students because there are higher retention rates if the program was offered earlier. The regional disparities in subsidy amounts also “created a gaping disjoint in participation rates” between the National Capital Region (NCR) where the participation rate was 76.54 percent versus those outside the region. Outside NCR, only Region 11 and the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) exceeded the national average of 42.6 percent, the solon pointed out.