PRIVATE SCHOOLS have been once again at the receiving end of a barrage of criticisms following the March Senate hearing which flagged alleged “ghost” or undocumented students as a possible “leakage” in the Senior High School Voucher Program (SHSVP) of the Expanded Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education Act (E-GASTPE).
Citing the 2016 and 2018 reports from the Commission on Audit (COA), Senate Committee on Basic Education head Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian revealed that more than 19,000 “ghost” or undocumented students were benefitting from the voucher program.
The Private Education Assistance Committee (PEAC), a five-member committee that was created to be the trustee of the Funds for Assistance to Private Education (FAPE), now finds itself in uncharted waters, disputing unfounded accusations that it failed to preserve the integrity of the SHSVP, and the Education Service Contracting (ESC) for the junior high school.
For the record, it is the PEAC that reported these findings to the Department of Education (DepEd) based on the monitoring activities conducted annually by its regional program committees. Were if not for the diligence of the PEAC regional monitoring teams, this would have gone totally unnoticed.
During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when it was very difficult to conduct on-campus monitoring of participating schools, the PEAC devised a way to continue the activity. It may be entirely different from what has been the practice in the past but the new set-up was able to evaluate the extent of compliance of individual schools with the program requirements.
The manual work is not for the faint-hearted. It includes checking the list of encoded beneficiaries generated from the PEAC’s management information system vis-à-vis the DepEd’s SF1 (School Register) and SF2 (Learner’s Daily Class Attendance). It also involves checking and verifying the data on the recipients’ birth certificates, taking note of whether it was issued by the PSA, the NSO or the municipal civil registry. It also entails comparing and cross-referencing the name on the birth certificates versus the systems-generated list, checking the minutest of details including the correct full names of the recipients. For the individual folders, the monitors check the supporting documents submitted by the beneficiaries that include the parents’ proof of income, the report card from the previous school, and the application form duly-signed by both the beneficiary and his or her parent. The objective of all these nitty-gritty steps is to ensure that the beneficiaries are all accounted for.
Admittedly, the system is far from perfect. However, the PEAC has not been remiss in its commitment to improve, enhance and tighten the system year after year. As an integral part of the annual monitoring activities, the PEAC has been consistent in discussing the findings to the participating schools so they remain compliant. At the same time, the PEAC has been providing recommendations to the DepEd so that together, they can continue to strengthen and safeguard the system.
A case in point is the marked improvement in the ESC IMS wherein built-in systems controls are now in place. For example, a school cannot encode a grantee who is already enrolled in another school because the system will automatically prevent it. Similarly, an accepting school cannot encode a transfer student if the same grantee has not been transferred-out by the releasing school. This control system did not happen overnight, but a product of continuous improvements based on the findings and recommendations of the PEAC monitoring teams.
I’m sure many ESC and SHSVP participating private schools have experienced a variety of problems with the DepEd’s Learner Information Systems (LIS). In fact, some of the initial “unaccounted” students are actually LIS-related issues and concerns. Since the LIS was initiated in 2011, the DepEd has resolved many problems concerning the students’ LRN, correct name and date of birth. Hopefully after this SHSVP controversy, we can expect the DepEd and the PEAC to establish an interphase in their respective MIS so that the same built-in controls in the ESC can be implemented as well in the voucher management system of SHSVP.
I can only understand and sympathise how frustrated Sen. Gatchalian must have been after learning about these irregularities. After all, he has been a staunch partner of the private schools. I am all for the necessary reforms in the SHSVP to prevent wastage of government funds. But to scrap the program entirely or decrease the subsidy just because three private schools in Region II have attempted to defraud the government is totally uncalled for. It is not only unfair and detrimental to the thousands of other private schools who work very hard to uphold the integrity of the programs, but a major backward step in maintaining the complementarity between the public and private academic institutions in the country.
