QUEZON City Rep. Alfred Vargas called for “urgent and decisive” government support for the struggling private school sector in a resolution he filed this week, calling out the lack of action to
address retrenched teachers and staff, affected students, and the closure of schools during the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic.

“Every private school closure is a tragic loss to learning and should be treated with concern by the State with the same gravity and seriousness,” Vargas, brother of congressional candidate Patrick Michael “PM” Vargas, said in the proposed resolution.

“It means wasted infrastructure and human capital, uncertainty in the future of our teachers and educators and anxiety for students and their families who are separated from communities of learning that they had been long part of,” he added.

Vargas cited UNICEF reports that the economic shock of the pandemic has placed private schools, especially low-cost private schools, in significant financial stress.

According to UNICEF, only 2 million out of a former 4.3 million students in private schools had re-enrolled at the beginning of the pandemic in the Philippines.

Vargas called the private school sector’s plight as an “educational crisis” in the making because of missing educational opportunities for millions of Filipino students.

According to the three-term congressman, his consultations with private school administrators and managers from his district signal that there is an education crisis at the horizon as many private schools in Quezon City had already closed because of serious financial losses.

“I personally met with members of the Association of Private School Administrators (APSA) – Quezon City and many of them voice their fear that with the opening of face-to-face classes in public schools, there will even be less concern for private schools from the Department of Education (DepEd),” Vargas stated.

“We cannot let private schools just die like an unattended patient and casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic,” he added.

In the draft resolution, Vargas said the DepEd should address the serious concerns of private schools nationwide “and explore whole-of-government and whole-of-society solutions aimed at supporting all our education stakeholders.”

“Wage subsidies and other forms of financial support to private schools and their teachers should be studied as among the measures that could alleviate their conditions,” Vargas said.

Vargas echoed civil society concerns of a “learning and child development catastrophe” if the state support for education stakeholders are not met.

He recalled that apart from restrictions on social gathering, the struggles of private schools are also a direct result of the “socio-economic shock of the pandemic to learners and students’ families, who could no longer bear the cost of tuition and matriculation fees and were forced to renege on their payment obligations to their schools.”

“Millions of children are now at risk of falling behind and, without intervention, the two-fold public health crisis and social welfare crisis of COVID-19 threatens to transform into an Education Crisis, disrupting the development of the youth who we behold to be the ‘Pag-asa ng Bayan,'” Vargas said.