In order to address the congestion experienced in public schools as classes have begun, Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian said that he has suggested to the Department of Education (DepEd) to look at the excess capacity of private schools and rechannel the students there.

In an interview on the ABS-CBN News Channel on Wednesday, August 30, Gatchalian who sits as chairperson of the Senate Committee on Basic Education, stated that the learner population growth in private schools has gone down by 16 percent.

"So in other words, there are excess capacities in our private schools that we can use via the voucher system. In fact, all of these private schools are actually located in congested areas such as Quezon City and Valenzuela, we can rechannel our students using the excess capacities of our private schools," Gatchalian explained.

Gatchalian said that so far implementation of the Education Service Contracting (ESC) has been successful, to which P52 billion has been allocated.

He said this is the biggest amount government has allocated for students to go to the private schools. He added that "common sense" will dictate that issuing vouchers is easier than building classrooms since these will be issued to students and they get to decide where to go.

"Maybe it's cheaper to increase the budget of the voucher system and we hit two birds with one stone. We decongest our public school and at the same time we use the excess capacity of the private schools and improve their financial standing," he stated.

Meanwhile, he mentioned that there is still a lack of funding in relation to building new classrooms. According to Gatchalian, even during the pre-pandemic time the allocation for a classroom was between P10 billion to P30 billion. Five years prior, he added that the budget required just to fulfill all the new classrooms was around P400 billion.

"That never changed until now. It's still at around P400 billion. So in other words, in short, we need P400 billion just to catch up. This is outside of the repairs, but we allocate only P10 to P30 billion at the most in terms of new classroom building," he said.

On the other hand, he also mentioned that the student population is growing to around four to five percent. And because our learner population is growing very fast, the facilities cannot catch up.

Gatchalian also said that calamities and typhoons have to be factored in as the country experiences approximately close to about 20 to 30 typhoons a year. And because of the typhoons, a lot of classrooms around the eastern seaboard get damaged and require replacement.

"And on top of that, the wear and tear. Our classrooms are also experiencing a lot of wear and tear especially near the coastal area because of rust and corrosion," he explained.

"So if you factor all of this, you constantly need to replace our classrooms. You constantly need to build our classrooms to address learner population growth," he added.