6 million students registered on first week – DepEd

MANILA, Philippines — Over six million students have already registered in public and private elementary and high schools nationwide, the Department of Education (DepEd) said as the first week of the remote enrollment for the upcoming school year comes to a close.

Data as of yesterday showed that 6,313,133 students have already registered their intent to enroll in the next school year, which is expected to largely forego traditional face-to-face classes due to threat of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

Over 6.1 million registered in public schools, while around 174,000 registered in private elementary and high schools.

In terms of grade level, the latest enrollment figures showed that more than 343,000 were in kindergarten, over 3.1 million in elementary, over 2.1 million in junior high school and over 687,000 in senior high school.

Some 11,000 students with disabilities have registered, as well as more than 30,000 for the alternative learning system.

Most of those who registered were from Region IV-A with 1,283,358, followed by Metro Manila with 895,406 and Region III with 772,035.

More than 27 million students were enrolled in public and private basic education institutions in the country last school year.

More than 22 million were enrolled in over 40,000 public kindergarten, elementary and high schools nationwide.

DepEd said the month-long enrollment would show if the number of students for the next school year would decline due to the pandemic.

To minimize risks of transmission, the agency has implemented a remote enrollment system wherein the teachers reach out to their former students through calls, text messages and online communication.

The conduct of physical enrollment is highly discouraged and may only be allowed – subject to strict physical distancing and other health standards – on the third week of June.

During the enrollment period, parents would also be asked to fill out a survey form, which would identify household capacity to adopt the different learning modalities being developed by DepEd.

The agency said the survey would generate critical data for designing of learning delivery strategies and approaches, as well as in planning, resource allocation and policy formulation.

According to DepEd, its public assistance and command center has already addressed 1,460 queries during the first week of enrollment.

Most of the concerns were related to enrollment, followed by questions on the learning continuity plan, school policy and operations and senior high school voucher concerns.