THE COORDINATING Council of Private Educational Associations of the Philippines urged the government to allow private schools to establish their own guidelines on the conduct of physical classes once these are allowed.

Cocopea Managing Director Joseph Noel Estrada appealed to the Senate to allow private schools to draw their own policies on the holding of face-to-face classes.

“We’d like to reiterate our request to have a separate guidelines for pilot testing in the private education sector simply because the parameters and the environment are different, particularly on the consideration of space,” he said.

Estrada said that private schools can retrofit their facilities for the health and safety of the students.

“We remain to be on online remote learning because there’s no policy yet that allows us to give option to our parents, and because the guidelines for private schools would also be lumped in the policy guidelines that would be presented by the Department of Education,” Estrada said.

Public and private schools will continue to implement distance learning for School Year 2021-2022 because President Rodrigo Duterte ruled out the holding of physical classes on account of the threat of the Delta variant of Covid19.