MANILA – To address the country’s 165,000-classroom backlog in less than the projected 55 years, Senator Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan is pushing for tax incentives and stronger public-private partnerships (PPP) to accelerate school building.

Under his proposed Classroom Building Acceleration Program Act, Pangilinan wants to institutionalize private sector participation and local government unit (LGU) counterpart funding to ensure the policies cannot be easily scrapped by future administrations.

“We should protect effective classroom-building programs from politics, partisanship, and personal agendas,” Pangilinan said. “If a program works, it should continue.”

The senator questioned why the Department of Education (DepEd) and the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) discontinued an Aquino-era scheme in which the national government and LGUs split classroom construction costs equally, alongside PPP initiatives.

“If the matching by the DBM (Department of Budget and Management) and the LGU of 50-50 plus the PPP as a policy worked, why did DepEd and DPWH change it? Why was it changed? Why was it not continued?” he asked during a joint hearing of the Senate committees on basic education, local government, and finance.

Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, who served as Valenzuela City mayor during the first half of the Aquino administration, said his city directly benefited from the counterparting program.

“In my personal experience, effective siya. I remembered we were given 50% of the funding from DepEd and then 50% will come from the local government,” Gatchalian said. “Effective in a sense because sabay-sabay kami nagpapatayo ng buildings… in a matter of one year, sabay-sabay kami natatapos.”

DepEd Undersecretary Wilfredo Cabral agreed the program was effective, noting it was dropped after the change in administration.

“The counterparting agreement really was a good practice before, but in the change of administration, this was not considered,” Cabral said.

From 2010 to 2016, counterparting and PPPs built 185,000 classrooms and eliminated the 66,000-classroom backlog, according to a 2016 report by former DepEd Secretary Armin Luistro.

Pangilinan also pointed out that the current DepEd-DPWH setup costs ₱2.5 million to ₱3.8 million per classroom, compared with ₱1.5 million to ₱2 million under LGU-private sector partnerships.

“If we restore counterparting and PPPs, we can deliver more classrooms for the same budget—and do it much faster,” he said.