This is Part 2 of a 2-part series on public education in Catanduanes Province. Part 1, on educational attainment, appeared in last week’s edition.
If attainment tells the story of outcomes, the province’s school infrastructure tells the story of constraints. Catanduanes’ public basic education system, run through the DepEd Schools Division Office, consists of 234 public elementary schools and 42 public secondary schools — a mix of stand-alone national high schools, integrated schools with combined elementary and secondary levels, and senior-high-only campuses — spread across 20 “named” school districts in the province’s 11 municipalities.
That is a substantial footprint for an island province, and it is a reflection of the archipelagic geography that sees barangays across coastlines, upland interior areas and outlying areas reachable only by rough roads or boat.
Private schools exist but remain a minor part of the system. A handful of private secondary and senior-high providers operate mainly in and around Virac, alongside church-run and independent elementary schools.
The overwhelming majority of Catandunganon children — more than 90 percent — attend public schools, which makes DepEd’s capacity, not private-sector supply, the binding constraint on educational quality in the province.
For those pursuing education beyond high school, Catanduanes State University, with its main campus in Virac and satellite campuses, anchors the province’s higher-education offerings, supplemented by a few smaller colleges and technical-vocational institutes. Students seeking more specialized programs generally have to leave the island.
Total public basic-education enrollment in the province runs in the neighborhood of 60,000 to 65,000 learners across kindergarten through senior high, plus several hundred enrolled in the Alternative Learning System.
ALS is a parallel, non-formal education track under DepEd that complements formal schooling. It is designed for learners who cannot attend regular classes due to poverty, work, family responsibilities, disability, remote location, or other barriers.
In the 2026–2027 school year, the Department of Education Catanduanes Schools Division Office reported that there were 1,005 learners enrolled in the ALS across the province.
Generally speaking, distribution across grade levels reflects a demographic shift familiar across the Philippines: elementary enrollment has been gradually shrinking over the past decade, a result of declining birth rates and the outmigration of young families and professionals, while junior and senior high enrollment has held roughly steady or grown, buoyed by the mandatory secondary education requirement under K-12 laws and by improved retention into the early high school years.
On staffing ratios, the picture is mixed but not alarming. Student-teacher ratios at the elementary level in Catanduanes have generally been in a manageable range. The picture tightens at the secondary level, where both teacher and classroom loads run noticeably higher — a pattern consistent with the K-12 program’s rapid expansion of senior high school after 2013, which added two additional grade levels nationwide without a matching expansion of secondary teaching staff and classroom space in many provinces, Catanduanes included.
In May 2013, President Benigno S. Aquino III signed a law establishing legal standards for the K–12 system — 1 year of kindergarten, 6 years of elementary school, 4 years of junior high, and 2 years of senior high.
The Schools Division Office has not been passive in the face of constraints. In recent years it has rolled out teacher training programs, learning-resource development initiatives, literacy and numeracy interventions, and school-based management reforms, alongside continued investment in the Alternative Learning System to draw out-of-school youth and adults back into some form of education. These are real institutional efforts, and they show up, modestly, in enrollment and participation trends.
The underlying constraints are structural and will not be solved by programming alone. For example, Catanduanes is in a typhoon corridor — a reality that periodically damages classrooms and disrupts the school calendar — and its municipalities depend heavily on national government transfers rather than local revenue to fund school infrastructure. Remote upland and island barangays face the steepest infrastructure gaps: schools that are farther from paved roads, harder to staff, and slower to receive repairs after storm damage. Recruiting and retaining teachers in these areas remains a persistent challenge, one that compounds the secondary-level staffing strain described above.
Taken together, the two halves of this series on public education in the province — attainment and infrastructure — reinforce each other. A province with under-resourced secondary schools in its most remote areas will struggle to lift completion rates in exactly the places where dropout risk is highest. And a population that stops short of finishing high school, in turn, produces fewer local teachers, nurses, and professionals to staff those same schools and clinics — a cycle that outmigration of the more educated, particularly women, only deepens. Breaking that cycle will likely depend less on any single reform than on sustained investment in the secondary-school infrastructure and staffing that current data suggest is the province’s most acute bottleneck.
A note on sourcing: Some figures cited here come from provincial and regional estimates.
Bryce McIntyre, PhD, resides in San Andres. He holds a doctoral degree from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA.
Perplexity AI aided in the research for this article.