SENATE Minority Leader Ralph Recto on Friday said the rush to bring internet connectivity to schools should not lead us to overlook the fact that one in four schools has no clean water and one in six schools are not connected to a power grid.
He stressed that the absence of these basic utilities in places where our children spend their day should be given the same attention as illegal drugs.
He said the Department of Education should now treat providing clean water and reliable power to schools priority expenditures and must be regularly included in its annual budget.
“Water pipes and power lines are as important as broadband cables,” Recto said. “In fact, electricity is a predicate of ICT-aided education.”
The senator said water and power should now be included in “the scoreboard of school facilities” delivered, together with “traditional items” like books and classrooms.
“Erasing the backlog in water and power is the new frontier in education challenges,” he said.
Recto said “zero-water” schools number 3,628 out of 46,739 nationwide, according to a presentation by the Department of Education last March.
In addition, 8,109 schools primarily rely on rainwater catchment, “which renders them basically water-less,” Recto said. This brings up the real total of water-less schools to 11,737, he said.
Only 18,393 schools nationwide have piped-in water. The next biggest source are deep wells, which 17,757 schools have, Recto said.
“Let’s say three in every five schools lacks reliable, clean piped-in water, and you apply this ratio to the public enrolment of about 20.9 million, then easily about 12.5 million students go to schools with less than reliable water supply,” he said.
With lack of water comes the problem of sanitation facilities, Recto said. “There is a toilet shortage in all schools and you don’t need statistics to back that claim.”
While the previous government had started building more toilets, including classrooms with one, the toilet-to-room gap remains wide, as only a fraction of the 493,669 classrooms nationwide have lavatories, Recto said.
Recto said the availability of water impacts not just the health of students—one survey said 60 percent of gradeschoolers have intestinal worms—but also school-based nutrition programs.
Another basic utility lacking is electricity, with 5,911 schools “with no access to a single watt” in 2013, Recto said. Some 1,492 upland and island schools make do with solar panels or generator sets, bringing up to 7,403 the total number of off-grid schools.