Briones alarmed by low number of private schools conducting face-to-face classes

FILE PHOTO: A teacher and her students learn together at the Pedro Cruz Elementary School in San Juan City as it reopened its face-to-face classes on Thursday, February 10, 2022. The school passed the DepED Schools Safety Assessment Tool (SSAT) which shows its readiness for the limited face-to-face learning modality. INQUIRER/GRIG C. MONTEGRANDE

MANILA, Philippines — Education Secretary Leonor Briones on Tuesday raised concern over the low number of private schools conducting face-to-face classes, saying it is still a challenge convincing them to revert to in-person mode of learning.

In the taped briefing with President Rodrigo Duterte, Briones said that only 676 out of about 16,000 private schools have started holding face-to-face classes, which translates to only 5.47%.

This is a far cry from the number of public schools conducting in-person classes, which is about 25,668 schools or 56.89% of the country’s total number of public schools.

“The challenge is ‘yung private schools kasi, out of 16,000 private schools, we only  have 676 doing face-to-face, in spite of the fact that they were quite active in demanding face-to-face,” Briones said.

“Ang private schools, decision nila ‘yun and so we are now aggressively endeavoring to convince them to open at this time,” she added.

For his part, presidential adviser for COVID-19 response Vince Dizon said that upon consultation with private schools, he learned that some parents are still “quite apprehensive” about letting their children go back to face-to-face learning.

“There is some resistance from private schools to do face-to-face classes. Some parents in the private schools seem to be quite apprehensive about letting their children go back to school, which of course is the right of every parent,” he said in the same briefing.

READ: DepEd: Over 10,000 schools OK’d to resume limited in-person classes 

EDV