REP. SALVADOR B. BELARO, JR.
1-Ang Edukasyon Party-list
Assistant Majority Leader
Member, Higher and Technical Education and 10 other committees
IRR OF FREE COLLEGE EDUCATION IN SUCs
TO BE PUBLISHED SOON
It is time for a full court press execution of the free college education law
It is good that the UniFAST Board, headed by the CHED, is finally ready with the implementing rules and regulations of the free college education law and is preparing to publish it soon.
There is however the matter of accountability because UniFAST failed to comply with the UAQTEA deadline for publishing the IRR. That deadline was last October 2017. It is now March 2018, six months after the deadline.
Now I understand the CHED and UniFAST board have had rough months while Dr. Patricia Licuanan was CHED Chairperson, but the law did set a deadline and UniFAST failed to meet that deadline. People in the UniFAST Secretariat must be held accountable and liable.
Let me focus now on some implementation concerns.
Most SUCs still have June as the start of this academic year while some SUCs are shifting to August as school opening time.
UniFAST and CHED now have just two to five months to execute the IRR and all the mechanisms and procedures needed to make things happen they way they should.
It is now incumbent upon the CHED and UniFAST to make up for valuable lost time and do a full court press.
It might make things easier to make all the SUCs start their academic year in August. CHED chairs the governing boards of all SUCs and through that position, they can convince the SUCs to shift to August.
To avoid a repeat of what happened to the K to 12 Transition Program scholars, I want the UniFAST and CHED to have an online portal through which everyone, including Congress, can monitor the progress of the implementation of UAQTEA in real-time down to the regional office level of the CHED.
CHED and UniFAST should have learned by now from the mistakes in how the K to 12 Transition Program was done. They had better get it all right this time around because 900,000 SUC students will be affected if they bungle this. (END)
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