DepEd: Ready for senior high

THE DEPARTMENT of Education is “ready” for the first day of classes on June 13 for Grade 11 students, the pioneering batch for senior high school under the new K-12 basic education program.

“The DepEd is ready…. You can be assured… the first day of classes will be orderly,” Assistant Secretary Tonisito Umali said in an interview over dzBB.

Umali said the training of Grade 11 teachers was going on but was expected to end “in time” for June 13.

He also said that “many” of the “more or less 23,000” classrooms the DepEd had planned to construct for the Grade 11 students had been completed.

“There are a few that are still under construction and this is what we always say—we are very ready but if there are a few classrooms that will not finish construction by June 13, after one or two weeks these will be OK,” he said.

Umali said not all the public senior high schools will offer all four student tracks—academic, technical-vocational livelihood, sports, and arts and design—

but there should be schools nearby that offer the track a student may want.

He said students may go to the DepEd website to see which schools offer the tracks they wish to take.

“You don’t expect all the [tracks] to be offered in one senior high school because that is not feasible; it’s too expensive. Can you imagine building a field, because we want a sports track, a football field and other sports facilities; constructing studios because one wants arts and design, and setting up laboratories to teach [science, technology, engineering and mathematics],” Umali said.

He said the DepEd had conducted a study of students’ preferred track and identified the schools they could attend.

He said the study showed that 49 percent of the students wanted the academic track, 49 percent opted for technical-vocational livelihood, 1 percent the sports track, and 1 percent arts and design.

“We already know the number of public senior high school students and the tracks they will take based on our early registration campaign. We have seen how many will go to state universities and private [higher education institutions],” he said.

“We know we have some faults, and there are things they still don’t know, but when it comes to our public school students, we are confident because we have been engaging them since last year. They know the tracks that will be offered,” Umali said.