This was confirmed on Wednesday.
Michael Poa, Undersecretary of the Department of Education, confirmed on Wednesday, May 22, that President Fedinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos, Jr. has greenlit a proposal regarding the Philippines’ academic calendar.
In the said measure, the country will be moving back to the old academic calendar for the basic education system starting with school year 2025-2026.
To accommodate the change, the upcoming school year 2024-2025 will be shortened, and will begin on July 29, 2024 and end on April 15, 2025 from kindergarten to senior high school.
With the shortened school calendar, it has been previously discussed and reported that schools might open Saturday classes as a compromise.
Although that has not been confirmed yet as the official calendar of activities for the next school year has not yet been publicized.
Meanwhile, the following academic year 2025-2026 is due to start on June 16, 2025 and will run for the usual period of 10 months until March 31, 2025.
The Philippines first adopted the August-May calendar through colleges and universities since the mid-2010s.
However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Department of Education pondered upon the idea of implementing the same setup starting SY 2020-2021, but was affected by the lockdowns and postponed to SY 2021-2022 instead.
But once the full-implementation of face-to-face classes began last school year, there have been multiple heat-related cases recorded during hot and humid months, such as fainting due to inadequate ventilation and crowded classrooms in some areas.
In March 2023, a single incident during a fire drill in Cabuyao, Laguna caused 83 students to be hospitalized due to heat exhaustion, leading to the cancelation of classes.
DepEd, at that time, allowed face-to-face classes to be suspended due to extreme heat, and permitted the use of distance-learning tools whenever necessary.
Initially, the plan was to revert to the old June-March setup starting SY 2026-2027, but that was brought forward in response to the struggles of teachers and students alike during the dry and humid months of April and May.
This was especially alarming this year, when the heat index in multiple areas skyrocketed to more than 50°C, which prompted in-person schooling to be suspended by local government units (LGUs) and be replaced by other modalities, including asynchronous classes and the blended online and offline method.