40 school buildings to be built in Kalinga

TABUK CITY, Kalinga — The administration through the Department of Education will build 40 school buildings with P38 million total appropriations to be implemented this year to address shortage of classrooms in the province.

Bids and Awards Committee member Romulo Galnawan said opening of bids documents for the first 19 school buildings in seven cluster areas was already completed so that the projects will be simultaneously implemented even before the start of classes this coming school year 2011-2012.

The bidding of the multi-million projects will be preceded by the separate bidding of the Nambaran Agro-National High School, Sumadel National High School and the Division Office pavement in order to synchronize the implementation of public works projects that will help address the inadequate school buildings provincewide.

Another seven cluster schools will be bid out anytime both for elementary and high schools which will be located in various parts of the province in order to complete the procedures required by law in the implementation of public works projects.

“Bidding will be open to all qualified contractors in the province and outside pursuant to the Aquino administration’s policy on transparency and competitive bidding so that qualified project implementers will be the ones to undertake the school building projects,” Galnawan said.

He said the 19 high school buildings, 11 elementary and 10 primary schools are expected to be implemented second semester of this year or earlier depending on the processing of the documents awarding the projects to the deserving contractors.

“This will solve partially the shortage of classrooms in the province which is been a long standing problem of teachers and students in public elementary and high schools,” Galnawan said.

More than 100 school building projects were proposed to be built in the province in order to bring the schools closer to the communities for improved accessibility among the students however, not all were approved by the Central Office of DepEd considering that the agency has to distribute the limited budget of the agency this year to all districts needing the construction of school buildings in order to partially settle the shortage of classrooms for this coming school year,” Galnawan said. “Identification and selection of these projects was based on the on-site validation that determined them as priority.

The funding came from the regular fund of DepEd worked out by Schools Division Superintendent Norma Brillantes.

The local DepEd will include the unfunded projects in their list of priority projects next year so that the priority concerns will be the ones to be addressed prior to the less priority ones.