MORE than half of the Philippines’ public schools are already conducting face-to-face classes, the Department of Education (DepEd) reported Tuesday, May 3, 2022.Education Secretary Leonor Briones told President Rodrigo Duterte during his Talk to the People Address aired Tuesday morning, May 3, that 25,668 public schools in the country are back to holding in-person classes.“This 56.89 percent of the total number of public schools. We are more than half already,” she said.Briones admitted that the challenge now remained with the private schools, noting that only 676 of the around 60,000 private schools in the country have been implementing face-to-face classes.The 676 is only 5.47 percent of the total number of private schools, she added.She noted, however, that in total, 26,344 schools (including public and private) have gone back to holding in-person classes.As to the number of learners participating, Briones said 5,948,640 (25.61 percent) are in public schools, while 226,991 (7.09 percent) are in private schools.There are already a total of 6,175,631 learners across all grade levels participating in the face-to-face classes.Briones said the DepEd is targeting 75 percent of schools implementing the in-person classes, thus “we are now aggressively endeavoring to convince them (private schools) to open at this time.”She assured that about 93 percent of the DepEd staff have already been vaccinated against coronavirus disease (Covid-19).National Task Force (NTF) Against Covid-19 deputy chief implementer Vince Dizon, for his part, said they find it challenging to convince the private schools because some of them are still resistant.“It seems that it is a mix of various reasons. The most compelling of which is some parents are still quite apprehensive about getting their children go back to face-to-face,” he said.Dizon then suggested to the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) to issue a resolution that would strongly encourage schools, especially the private schools, to go back to face-to-face classes as soon as possible.“Although we acknowledge that there are various modes of learning, it is time to already go back to face-to-face and the IATF will issue such a strong endorsement or encouragement for private schools in particular,” he said.Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said the Department of Health will help DepEd in ramping up the vaccination of students in areas where the vaccination rate is still low.Dizon said NTF chief implementer and vaccine czar Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr. had already given the instructions to make the Covid-19 vaccines available for all schools in the Philippines.“We have 15 million doses of vaccines for pediatrics, for 5 to 11 years old. We have 10 million in stock remaining and these can be easily deployed to all schools for all our children,” Dizon said.