Aside from this, Schools Division Superintendent Dr. Lourdes Victoriano says the high cost of tuition in private schools has driven more students to public schools.

Mayor Vergel ‘Nene’ Aguilar, meanwhile, says officials have also had to deal with the migration of pupils from nearby cities and towns to the city’s public schools. This phenomenon, he adds, is common most especially in schools located on the city’s boundaries.

“Patayo ka nga nang patayo ng buildings, padami naman nang padami ang mga bata (You construct one building after another, but the children keep on multiplying),” remarks Aguilar. This is even as Las Piñas has emerged with the sixth lowest net enrollment ratio — 71 percent — among the NCR’s 16 cities and one town in 2007. This means 29 percent of Las Piñas children who should be in school are not enrolled.

Las Piñas also has the highest dropout rate (1.24 percent) in the NCR, or the highest number of pupils who leave school during the year, as well as those who complete the grade level but fail to enroll the next school year.

	Table 1: Selected Performance Indicators for NCR’s Elementary Level by Division (SY 2006-2007) Source: Research and Statistics Division, Department of Education and DepEd NCR’s Planning Unit CITY/MUNICIPALITY NET ENROLMENT RATIO (%) COHORT SURVIVAL RATE - GRADE VI (%) DROPOUT RATE (%) NATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT TEST MEAN SCORE Caloocan City 69.75 85.22 1.01 59.78 Las Piñas City 70.55 71.67 1.24 64.12 Makati City 71.33 60.56 0.54 68.19 Malabon and Navotas 82.18 77.40 0.37 56.68 Mandaluyong City 66.89 85.12 0.38 62.03 Manila 76.83 73.33 0.40 57.98 Marikina City 70.26 78.31 0.68 67.10 Muntinlupa City 69.30 70.98 0.93 60.02 Parañaque City 73.39 79.37 0.26 53.02 Pasay City 65.31 62.77 1.22 59.00 Pasig and San Juan 83.11 77.12 0.32 55.11 Quezon City 71.22 82.01 0.35 52.22 Taguig and Pateros 74.71 76.39 0.59 65.37 Valenzuela City 73.97 68.21 0.56 61.60 AVERAGE 73.21 76.58 0.57 60.18

PUPILS PER CLASS
Cramped classrooms may be partly to blame for this. Pamplona Elementary School-Central teacher Amelia Ordoñez says that 10 years ago, she used to handle classes of 40 pupils each. Now it’s up to 66 students per class.

“It’s hard to mold discipline among the pupils if they are too many,” says Ordoñez, who has been teaching for more than three decades now. “It’s also difficult to follow up on them or a do a lesson summary per day because time is very limited.”

She says that in her school, at least five percent of the student population comes from outside Las Piñas.The latest DepEd data indicate that Pamplona Elementary School-Central has a total enrolment of 3,050 with only 17 instructional rooms. An average of 179.41 pupils share one room each day, the highest number posted among Las Piñas’s 20 public elementary schools.

	ONE of the 20 public primary schools experiencing teacher and classroom shortage in Las Piñas. [photo courtesy of the Las Piñas City website]

The classroom shortage has led the school to take some drastic measures. For instance, Ordoñez says, students in Grade 1 — save for those in the first section — have been divided into three shifts of four hours each; all shifts have a 10-minute break. Educators say the daily time allotment for learning at Grade 1 level is 320 minutes, or more than five hours.

Comments former education undersecretary Juan Miguel Luz: “If students don’t learn because they have less time in class, that is the crux of the low achievement problem.”

'MIGRANT STUDENTS'
Aguilar reckons that some of the “migrant students” that have helped bloat the population of public schools here simply live nearer to these than those within their own city or town. But he also believes his city has become a victim of its own good press.

He says that families from elsewhere move to Las Piñas because of the many services offered by the local government, such as a city college that offers free education to poor but deserving students. Each certified city resident can also avail of up to P25,000 worth of services a year at accredited hospitals.

The mayor projects pride as he rattled off the benefits Las Piñeros enjoy, but it’s clear he wishes he could be as pleased with Las Piñas’s education statistics. He has thus proposed the full implementation of a comprehensive integrated education program in the city starting in June, which would include the construction of more school buildings.

Official data show that although all of the city’s public elementary schools have been experiencing severe classroom shortage, only eight buildings have been built since 2002, and these were just for seven elementary schools. The construction of four more buildings has been proposed but not yet bidded out.

The city has also been playing catch-up in getting new teachers. From 2003 to early 2007, its public schools hired a total of only 87 new teachers. Last schoolyear, though, the schools took in 97 more. As of February 2008, the DepEd Las Piñas Division hired an additional 118 upon Aguilar’s directive.