DepEd pushing for return of P650-M Quick Response Fund

Education Secretary Leonor Briones at the 2nd National K-12 Conference, Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2017. (Photo from the Department of Education)

If relief supplies can be prepositioned in places near disaster-prone areas, why not school equipment and textbooks too?

The Department of Education (DepEd) would want to do that. That’s why it has started negotiating witth the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) and Malacañang for the restoration of its P650-million Quick Response Fund (QRF).

Education Secretary Leonor Briones announced the move last Tuesday during the 2nd National K-12 Conference at the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC), which was attended by more than a thousand education officials, school administrators, curriculum specialist, teachers, and other stakeholders.

In her speech at the conference, Briones said it would take from three to six months to rebuild totally destroyed classrooms and schools – disrupting classes and affecting thousands of learners.

“We are building school buildings, but at the same time, they are getting destroyed,” she said. “You are trying to provide textbooks and computers, but they are covered in mud in a matter of months.”

Prepositioning crucial school materials would prevent classes from being disrupted for too long following calamities.

Talking with reporters later, Briones said that she had brought up the matter during the Cabinet meeting on Monday night.

“We had a very long conversation on this during the Cabinet meeting,” she said.

She added that DepEd would have another dialogue with Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno to push for the return of the QRF.

“The DBM withdrew that from us because they said we don’t have the necessary professional capacity to deal with disasters,” she said. “But we said, it’s not necessarily so since we [schools] are the ones affected by disasters and we have an interest on it.”

The QRF is a standby fund used for the government’s rehabilitation and relief programs and projects, including prepositioning of relief and equipment, in areas hit by calamities, epidemics and catastrophes.

In 2015, the Senate finance committee questioned government agencies over the slow use of QRF, pointing out that P10 billion was still in the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Fund in September of that year. The DepEd had received P1 billion of the QRF in 2015. /ATM