Mayor Vico Sotto deals with congestion in Pasig City public schools

Education Secretary Sonny Angara recently stated that given the current budget and the growing classroom shortage, it could take up to 30 years to fully address public school congestion.

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Given this, the Cristina Research Foundation, a public policy research and advocacy organization (full disclosure: We are the Chairman of Cristina Research), decided to conduct a study on the congestion in our Elementary and High School public schools.

The initial conclusion is that the 30-year period is optimistic.

INTROSPECTIVE

VICTOR S. LIMLINGAN

The current backlog is 165,000 classrooms and yet less than 1,000 new classrooms were constructed in 2024.

To better understand the congestion problem, Cristina Research created three maps to visualize congestion on three levels: 1) regional, 2.) division-wide, and, 3.) city level. The data generated displayed enrollment and average pupil-classroom-ratio (PCR) within each sample region.

Cristina Research then decided to focus on congestion in Metro Manila where the congestion is critical as shown in Table 1.

Note that while Metro Manila students account for only 9% of enrolled students in public schools, they account for 21.8% of the congestion in public schools. This is understandable given that the main bottleneck of the government school building program is the lack of properties in which to construct classrooms and Metro Manila is, of course, crowded.

Given this information Cristina Research approached Pasig Mayor Vico Sotto asking for an opportunity to present its findings on his city’s public schools. He invited Cristina Research to present its findings to the Pasig City Local School Board (LSB) on June 23.