THE DEPARTMENT of Education is considering a shorter pilot run of limited face-to-face classes, an official said on Thursday.

Education Undersecretary Nepomuceno Malaluan said the department met with its technical team to review the timeline of the pilot run.

“Itong pilot na ito kaya napakasusi kasi tingin natin very critical to the expansion so we are being very careful with this phase kasi kahit maliit lamang na schools ang pariticipating dito, malaki ang impact sa expansion phase. Nonetheless, we are considering it,” Malaluan said in a media briefing.

Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, chairman of the Senate’s Basic Education Committee, earlier expressed concern on the timeline of the pilot run.

“Based on DepEd timeline, the time we will expand is on March 7 next year which is almost six months already. We’re only looking at 59 schools now. We have 60,000 schools. Of which 47,000 are public schools,” Gatchalian said.

He pointed out that the 120 schools included in the dry run are just a small fraction of the 60,000 public and private schools in the country.

“My point is if we have this kind of timetable, we’d have two years of school closures,” he added, even noting that six months to gather information is “too long.”

The pilot run of in-person classes in low-risk areas will begin on November 15. It is scheduled to end on January 31, 2022.

An evaluation of the pilot study and the presentation to the President of the pilot report, as well as proposed expansion will take place in February 2022.

Depending on the result of the evaluation, DepEd eyes the start of expansion for limited physical classes on March 7, 2022.