Recto bats for bigger school health budget
9 in 10 kids have tooth decay but only 1 dentist for 23,000

SENATOR Ralph Recto today called for a bigger allocation for the health services of the Education department, citing the chronic lack of nurses, doctors and dentists to attend to 17.6 million public school students.

He scored in particular the lack of school dentists , of which there is only one for every 22, 660 students , despite a DepEd survey results showing nine in 10 students suffer from tooth decay .

Worse, the dental budget per student is a measly 50 centavos per year, Recto added.

"This is pathetic. How can our children focus on learning if they suffer from toothache?" he said.

To put a smile on the faces of public school students so that they can focus on learning rather than the annoying tooth problem, he urged the DepEd to hire more dentists and not confine their recruitment to teachers and principals.

Somehow, we can put a smile in their faces by providing them with proper dental health care, Recto stressed. Recto said 15.4 million students go to school every day nursing at least one decayed tooth. A for them in the alphabet stands for aray, he lamented.

But there were only 793 dentists in the DepEd payroll two years with no vigorous hiring taking place since then. On the average, one DepEd dentist serves 60 public elementary schools. For high school, the ratio is one dentist for every 54 schools.

We only have 86 public high school dentists nationwide, he said. Somethings wrong when weve got more presidential assistants and advisers in the Palace than dentists in high schools, the senator explained.

Compounding the dearth of dentists is the DepEds anemic budget for dental care--- which was a paltry P9 million in 2005. This, he said, is not even close to being called tinga.

This P9 million translates to a per student budget of 50 centavos. The cost of filling caries or extracting a tooth is P50. That 50 centavos is not even enough to buy a cotton ball, he said.

Recto said dental health care is one aspect of students welfare which has been overlooked. Those who scoff at this issue as being too petty probably has not experienced a toothache in his life. Toothache and learning dont co-exist.