MANILA, Philippines —Vice President Sara Duterte has been urged to investigate the Department of Education’s (DepEd) alleged failure to repair old classrooms despite its large budget for 2021.
Camarines Sur 2nd District Rep. LRay Villafuerte said the Commission on Audit’s (COA) annual assessment of DepEd found that furniture repair and upgrades weren’t done properly in 14 regional offices.
According to Villafuerte, in his province alone, DepEd under former secretary Leonor Briones failed to fix 1,800 classrooms in Iriga City and 35 other municipalities in 2021. He believes Duterte, who also heads DepEd, could address the issue.
“We are hopeful that Vice President and concurrent DepEd Secretary Inday Sara could look into her agency’s low accomplishment rate last year for its Basic Education Facilities Fund (BEFF) — as flagged by the COA — in the hope that the Department could, on her watch, put on the front burner the overdue makeover of almost 9,000 classrooms whose repair was already tucked in the BEFF’s P9.467-billion outlay in 2021,” the lawmaker said.
“In CamSur alone, the DepEd failed last year to patch up more than 1,800 classrooms in Iriga City and 35 municipalities, even if the refurbishment of these facilities was already included in last year’s allocations for the BEFF and QRF (Quick Response Fund) for school repair and provision of new furniture for both students and their teachers,” he added.
Villafuerte noted that the problem seems to stem from low absorptive capacity and not due to lack of funding, as a huge sum of the BEFF funds has been downloaded by the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) to DepEd.
DepEd, however, allegedly failed to transfer the funds to its local offices.
The lawmaker explained that the town of Pili, for example, was expected to have received P32.59 million for the repair of classrooms in 16 schools. However, none of the schools were actually repaired because funds were supposedly not released by DepEd.
With the QRF, Villafuerte said that there were 121 schools in Iriga City and 22 municipalities that were supposed to receive P560.35 million for repairs also, but as with Pili, the project was not funded.
“It was apparently a matter of low absorptive capacity and not a funding issue is given that nearly 80% of the repair budget had been obligated to the DepEd last year,” he said.
Despite the issues thrown at DepEd, Villafuerte is positive that its new administration under Sara Duterte can fix the mess.
“Considering her solid record as a down-to-earth local chief executive when she was mayor of Davao City, I am sure Vice President and Secretary Inday Sara will not let this setback slide,” he added.
COA’s audit report of DepEd has been a hot topic recently, but most of the attention focused on the purchases made by the Procurement Service of DBM (PS-DBM), as the laptops intended for teachers were overpriced and outdated.
COA flagged PS-DBM’s purchase of laptops in 2021, as each unit was worth P58,300 despite having an outdated processor — an Intel Celeron chip, which can be found on laptops with price ranges of P20,000 to P25,000.
DepEd agreed to the price of the laptops, even if they initially sought laptops priced at P35,046.50 — as seen on its Agency Procurement Request (APR).
DepEd has responded to the issue, saying that it is not yet correct to label the procurement as anomalous, as the Office of the Ombudsman filed neither a final report from COA nor a case.
However, the department also stressed that it was PS-DBM who bought the laptops, not them. In response, new PS-DBM executive director Dennis Santiago vowed to look into the issue.