The Department of Education on Friday urged parents and guardians to participate in the early registration in public schools which starts Saturday, Jan. 26.
Education Secretary Leonor Briones said that parents of learners who wish to pursue their schooling in public schools should take part in the month-long early registration of DepEd.
“We expect that the enrollment will increase based on the trend every year,” Briones said.
Every year, she noted that over a million learners enter the country’s educational system and the early registration “helps because it unloads the rush and the big crowd during enrollment period.”
Briones said that DepEd is expecting more learners every opening of a new school year particularly on the kindergarten level. “The old batch is expected to proceed to a higher grade level and new students will come in,” she explained.
The increase in population is the reason for this phenomenon. Aside from this, Briones noted that the enrollment also increases when out-of-school youth such as students who dropped out go back to schools.
“We also see migration of students from private to public schools due to many factors or various reasons,” she added.
Briones noted that on the average, one million to 1.5 million learners in kinder and Senior High School, respectively, are added to the school system annually. “You always have a new batch of learners coming in every year and we have to take care of them,” she explained.
The early registration for school year 2019-2010 is from Jan. 26 to Feb. 22.
Education Undersecretary Annalyn Sevilla said the early registration program of the DepEd is “for us to find out who will be the new students or pupils.”
Sevilla clarified that the activity only applies to incoming kinder, Grades 1 and 7, as well as Grade 11 learners. “Those who are in Grades 2 to 6, 8 to 10, and Grade 12 are automatically registered,” she said.
“We’re doing this because we need to estimate, for example, for our budget the Department for Budget and Management will ask us a budget proposal for 2020,” Sevilla said. “Before, we used to wait for the “real” enrollment but the data becomes wrong and outdated when we compute for resources,” she added. (Ina Hernando Malipot)