| CDN File photo
CEBU CITY, Philippines -A week since public school classes opened, the different offices of the Department of Education (DepEd) in the region continue to receive applications for late enrollments.
The education department has already recorded over 1.8 million pupils who are enrolled in public schools in Central Visayas, way beyond the 1.7 million target for the school year 2020 to 2021.
Salustiano Jimenez, the DepEd-7 director, told CDN Digital in a phone interview that they are anticipating a considerable rise in this year’s number of enrollees since late enrollment is allowed until the first week of November.
“From what we have observed during the first week of opening our classes, enrollment is increasing. And most likely, we will experience the same number of enrollees in the second week,” said Jimenez in a mix of English and Cebuano.
Jimenez, on the other hand, reports a drop in the number of students enrolled in private schools all over Central Visayas.
“We’re still 59 percent away from our target of 300,000. But we’re hoping that in the coming days this will increase as enrollment in our private schools are also ongoing,” he added.
First-week assessment
The DepEd-7 top official said the students and their parents did not report any major concerns during the first week of public school classes in Central Visayas.
“Everything was generally smooth aside from several issues. But we were able to address them right away,” said Jimenez.
Major problems that were reported to his office were on the flooding that affected parts of Cebu in the past few days and the Friday night fire that damaged the Paknaan Elementary School in Mandaue City.
Jimenez said they lost some of their modules during the fire. But he said that they already started to reprint around 1, 000 modules as a replacement for those that were lost or damaged during the fire and flooding incidences.
The DepEd official also took relief in the fact that they did not receive any official complaints on erroneous modules.
“But if there are errors found on our modules, we urge the public to direct their concern to us instead of posting it on social media so that we can make the proper corrections right away,” he added.
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Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the national government, through DepEd, has prohibited the conduct of face-to-face classes at all levels, both for public and private schools.
As a result, most schools opted to do distance learning with the use of various channels such as modules, online, and broadcast, to name some. / dcb