Cebu Governor Gwendolyn Garcia | CDN Digital file photo
CEBU CITY, Philippines — The Department of Education (DepEd) should focus on their teaching responsibilities and leave matters on culture, sports and even building constructions to other government agencies.
Cebu Governor Gwendolyn Garcia gave her unsolicited advise in a meeting with members of the provincial Local School Board (LSB) on Wednesday, September 25.
Garcia placed the blame on the continuous delays in the school building construction projects in Cebu province on the education department.
For 2018 and 2019, a total of 739 classroom building projects were scheduled for implementation in Cebu province. But only 62 of these have been completed so far.
All the 62 completed classrooms were funded from the 2018 budget. The construction of 595-classroom from the same year is still ongoing.
Garcia blamed DepEd’s “wanting to be a DPWH (Department of Public Works and Highways)” for the delays referring to the agency’s involvement in the procurement process and the actual construction of school buildings.
DepEd has its own engineering division that also participates in the procurement process and the creation of the programs for their construction projects. This includes site identification, site evaluation and even soil testing.
Enginer April Custodio, DepEd Cebu Province engineer III, passed on the blame to the contractors for causing delays in the actual project implementation.
During the LSB meeting on Wednesday, Custodio made an appeal for the Department of Public Works and Highways in Central Visayas (DPWH-7) to urge the contractors to expedite the construction process.
“Ang problema is ang contractor kay hinay kaayo. We inspected the areas and inig adto namo gamay ra kaayo ang mga nagtrabaho so unsaon man pagkahuman?” Custodio said.
(Delays are caused by the slow project implementation by the contractors. When we inspect the project sites, we get to discover that so very little has been done so far.)
Custodio said that they even have some unfinished projects that were started in 2016 yet. / dcb