To ease public school overcrowding, DepEd turns to map data

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Education (DepEd) will undertake a nationwide mapping of all 12,212 private schools this July to identify those that can "absorb" students from nearby overcrowded public schools through targeted voucher subsidies.

In partnership with the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2) and select universities, DepEd aims to pin down and eventually analyze the precise coordinates of all private schools in the country to decongest public schools that have too many students or too few classrooms.

The findings of this analysis will be used to inform the government's strategic distribution of student vouchers under the Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education (GASTPE), according to the news release of EDCOM 2, a three-year congressional body tasked with reviewing the country's education system.

“While mapping of public schools was previously conducted by DepEd and OpenStreetMap, this is the first time that DepEd will do a comprehensive mapping of all private schools across the country— a critical next step in furthering its recently released policy, DepEd Order No. 6, series of 2024, on the public and private basic education complementarity framework,” EDCOM 2 Executive Director Karol Mark Yee said.

The nationwide mapping project builds on DepEd's and the private sector's previous efforts to build a comprehensive dataset of all private schools in the country, EDCOM 2 added.

This initiative comes at a time when Congress is deliberating on bills that aim to expand DepEd's GASTPE program to cover all levels of basic education, or from kindergarten to Grade 12.  

RELATED: House panel OKs bill expanding DepEd's largest private school scholarship program 

Challenges have hounded DepEd's GASTPE program, especially its tuition fee subsidy scheme for private senior high school students under the Senior High School Voucher Program (SHS-VP). 

In March, Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, chairperson of the Senate basic education panel flagged the inequitable distribution of voucher subsidies, which ended up benefiting some student who do not need them. 

DepEd data cited by Gatchalian shows that in school year 2021-2022, at least 53% or P7.21 billion of the P13.69 billion allocation for the SHS-VP went to non-poor students, or students whose families earned above the poverty threshold. 

The senator also said that the absence of an effective "targeting mechanism" for the SHS-VP deprived an estimated 542,000 aisle learners of the much-needed subsidies. Aisle learners refer to students who already count outside the regular class size in school.

The government has also lost at least P360 million from "ghost" or undocumented students who were tagged GASTPE benefiacries, Gatchalian learned during the Senate hearing on the scholarship program.

Map data to identify schools with 'absorptive' capacity

Gatchalian, co-chairperson of EDCOM 2, said that the new mapping initiative aims to make sure that government resources are "spent optimally with the goal of decongesting public schools and helping the poorest learners."

Latitude and longitude coordinates of private schools will be used for geospatial analysis, which aims to "enable the identification of nearby public and private schools that could still accommodate additional enrollment," EDCOM 2 told Philstar.com in an online message.

"For congested public schools, this list of nearby schools can be used to facilitate enrollment referrals. At the national level, aggregating this information will also help determine the extent of ‘surplus’ enrollment (congestion) that can be decongested through transfers (e.g., facilitated with the use of vouchers) or other strategies," EDCOM 2 added.

With the nationwide mapping project, EDCOM 2 also eyes the faster collection and validation of data of private schools in the National Capital Region, Region IV-A, and BARMM; regions with the worst overcrowding in public elementary and junior high schools.

The findings from the analysis — which will involve the technical assistance of EDCOM 2 — can also be used for policy development as well as budget programming, the congressional body said.

Lawmakers and education officials have increasingly tapped the voucher system to accommodate the growing student population in basic education amid the perennial shortage of classrooms in public schools.

In 2023, DepEd built only around 3,600 new classrooms out of the planned 6,300, based on figures shared by Vice President Sara Duterte during her second Basic Education Report in January.