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President Arroyo declared that her government has licked the perennial problem of classroom shortage. This she did by applying a new formula to estimate the demand for classrooms.
Instead of the ideal ratio of 45 students to a class used for years by the Department of Education, Arroyo says the ratio of 100 students to a class should be adopted. Overcrowded schools, she says, are supposed to do double shifts.
Ex-education undersecretary Juan Miguel Luz disagrees with the President. For planning purposes, the ideal used by DepEd is 45 students per class. 45 per class is the adopted ideal here given our current realities (though in our neighboring countries — Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand — the norm is 25-30 per class.) What has happened over the past years due to (a) continued high population growth rate and (b) a significantly large transfer of students from private high schools to public high schools, is that our class sizes have ballooned to closer to 65 per class on average, with some reaching upwards of 90 in extreme cases.
To deal with this problem of overcrowding, DepEd embarked on an interim strategy in SY 2003-2004 to do double-shifts in the most overcrowded schools so that classrooms could be used TWICE in one day. Hence, the “classroom-to-student” ratio is actually twice the number of students per class because the room is used twice a day by two classes (morning and afternoon) rather than by just one class (for the entire day).
Source: Is there or isn't there a classroom shortage? by Ivonne T. Chua.
