Presidential candidates should order their army of volunteers and precinct watchers to stay in schools beyond May 9 to join the cleanup that will rid them of posters and campaign materials and spruce them up in time for the school opening in June.

Senator Ralph Recto said schools are expected to be “wallpapered” with printed paraphernalia next Monday when more than 54 million registered voters troop there to cast their ballots for new officials from the president down to town councilors.

“Sanitation-wise, schools will be collateral damage of the elections,” Recto said. “And the hard work of cleaning them should not be left to teachers alone. Candidates and political parties must join.”

The post-election clean-up, he stressed, will be easier if presidential candidates, their candidates for other positions, and all political parties will direct their supporters to participate.

“Basta ako I will order my supporters to take down all posters, which by the way are few as compared to others, and to help in the cleanup,” he said.

“Pag sinabi nating clean elections, dapat iwanang malinis ang mga paaralan,” he said.

Recto said the sooner public schools will be rid of the “traces of the elections,” the sooner they can be readied for June 13, the date Department of Education (DepEd) has set as when 46,847 public schools will open their doors to 21 million Kindergarten to Grade 11 students.

Recto said teachers “– who serve as electoral workhorses – “ will be tired from dawn-to-midnight duty of supervising the voting “so they would need all the help they can get in tidying up the litter of election day.”

The senator was referring to the May 9 prolonged voting hours of 6 am to 5pm, with teachers required to be at their stations not later than 5 am.

As a result of their minimum 15-hour duty, Recto had already called on the government to increase by P1,000 the honorarium of teachers serving in the Board of Election Inspectors.

At least 233,487 public school teachers will be mobilized to man the 92,509 clustered precincts, almost all of which will be in public schools.

Recto said there is a” narrow window from voting to class opening when school preparation activities can be done,” including construction of new classrooms, delivery of books and chairs, and orientation of new teachers.

According to Recto, Congress has given DepEd P61.8 billion to build 43,000 classrooms, P13.5 billion to hire 62,320 teachers, and P4.18 billion to buy 103.2 million textbooks this year.

Our schools also have to grapple with shortfalls in other facilities, he said. By Recto’s count, 13,749 schools have no clean water supply while 7,403 are not connected to any power grid.

“So after May 9, beehive dapat ito ng construction,” he said.