THE Professional Regulations Commission (PRC) yesterday admitted that it has been getting more than the usual number of applicants for the September 2016 Licensure Examination for Teachers (LET).
Usually, they only cater to applicants from Region 7, but they’ve been receiving applicants from other regions like Regions 6 and 8 and from Mindanao, PRC 7 Public Information Officer Armond Englis told Sun.Star Cebu.
Englis was reacting to the picture that appeared on the front page of Sun.Star Cebu yesterday. It showed hundreds of applicants sleeping beside the PRC office in Mandaue City.
They arrived as early as 11 p.m. last July 21 to get priority numbers at 5 a.m. the next day, which was the deadline for the teachers board exam.
President Rodrigo Du-terte has promised to cut lines for government services, especially in the PRC, the Land Transportation Office, Department of Foreign Affairs, the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board and the Bureau of Customs, among others.
“Considering that we have only few personnel, around 30, to perform all functions. We have to provide priority numbers to control the volume of applicants,” Englis said.
Board exams
“In fact, we give 500 priority numbers for LET applicants only and we still have other applicants for various professions,” Englis said.
Aside from that, PRC 7 also processes renewal of licenses, state board verification, certifications and initial registrations for new passers daily.
“These, aside from the fact that we conduct at least four board exams every month. Maybe the reason for this extraordinary volume of applicants may be because of the K to 12 (K-12) program of the Department of Education,” Englis said.
But Englis said this situation usually occurs when the deadline of the examination is fast approaching.
Last Friday was the deadline for LET repeater applicants and July 29 is the deadline for LET first-timers.
“Actually the process is simple, but the huge number of applicants contributed and prolonged the process, plus an occasional systems offline. Anyway, we are doing our best to simplify the process for our clients’ convenience,” Englis said.
He also said the number of examinees went up because they’re afraid there’ll be few enrollees in first- and second-year college next year since there’ll be no new high school graduates because of the additional two years in high school under the K-12 program.
“For those college teachers who may be affected as a consequence of no enrollees, they were encouraged to take the teachers board exam for them to teach in the junior and senior high school (Grade 11 and Grade 12),” Englis said.
Englis also said PRC 7 is undermanned.
“PRC Cebu has only 36 employees, 20 of them are job-orders and our office supposedly covers only Region 7 like Cebu, Bohol, Negros Oriental and Siquijor,” Englis said.