DAVAO CITY—The Department of Education should start adjusting the government vouchers issued to public-school students who intend to enroll in private schools, the Davao City Association of Catholic Schools (DACS) here said.
Jimmie-Loe P. de la Vega, DACS executive director, said the voucher amount is “way below” the level sufficient to sustain the education of a child given the standard and quality offered by private schools.
The government voucher amount for those in the senior high-school level varies: from P20,000 for public-school students coming from the provinces down to P17,000 for public-school students in highly urbanized areas to as low as only 80 percent of the value of a voucher for a private-school student from the provinces.
“Whereas, students in the private schools would chalk up from P80,000 to P100,000 in tuition for the whole year in Davao City,” he said. The amount is commonly ascribed to getting the best faculty members and paying them well, as well as installing good facilities “conducive to learning,” he added.
“The government must understand that we do things that the government must have been doing, but we did it to support the children’s right to education,” he said.
Nationally, the ratio of students going to public and private schools is 60-40, the bigger number going to public schools. In Davao City, it is 50-50, he said.
There are more than 300 private schools in the Davao region, and the DACS has 68 of them operating in the city. Ideally, de la Vega said, “a government voucher would fully subscribe the tuition amount required by the public schools.”
“But we understand the government has barely enough resources to go around, but it would be much appreciated that it would gradually adjust the voucher amount now,” he said.
He said the DACS has repeatedly discussed this position in various gatherings and he said the Department of Education has said it understood the predicament also of the private schools.