Benguet surpasses 100 percent enrollment goal

The Department of Education-Benguet has reached more than a hundred percent of its enrollment target for school year 2020-2021, a ranking education official reported.
Division Schools Superintendent Benilda Daytaca said they now have 103.56 percent of enrollees in the elementary and secondary level or a total of 81, 241 students compared to last year’s enrollment of 78, 450 learners in the province.
“This is due to the massive information education campaign in partnership with all the local government units which really campaigned from one barangay to another,” she said. 
Daytaca said they will still determine the profiles of students who enrolled in public schools to determine if the data were a result of migration of learners from private to public schools.
“We do not know where the increase is. Maybe we got all our expected enrollees. The transferees from private schools are not yet reflected in the data,” she said.
Daytaca said there are 12,085 enrollees in private schools for the upcoming school year, or a decrease by 67 percent compared to 17,994 enrollees the previous school year.
Data from the DepEd-Cordillera as of July 29 shows a total of 6,258 learners who moved from private schools, state universities and colleges and alternative learning system to public schools in the province.
The data has been broken as follows: 3,603 in elementary; 1,791 in junior high school; 782 in senior high school, and 82 learners with disabilities. 
On the other hand, there are 654 learners from public schools, SUCs, and ALS to private schools – 114 in elementary, 386 in junior high school, 153 in senior high school, and one learner with disability.
Daytaca said the pilot testing for module-based and blended learning in Benguet is now ongoing. Benguet will also make use of TV and radio-based instructions to reach learners in far-flung areas.
“The children are already restless, so we should really start our schooling. Our teachers and learners are ready based on our observation during the pilot testing,” she said. – Ofelia C. Empian