The stool is Quijano's insurance that she would not be sent home by the principal who instructed the school's 937 students to bring their own chairs when classes opened last June. But she cannot leave it in school because her own home is also lacking in chairs.

Most students at the school are luckier than Quijano, since at least they don't have to return their chairs home each day; their parents had made or bought them an armchair especially for their use, or allowed them to borrow an extra chair or stool from home. The children have all been sensible enough to put their names at the back of the chairs to ensure no one else can claim these for their own.

But the chairs are now falling apart. Constructed crudely from coconut lumber in assorted styles and sizes, nearly all the students' chairs have lost an armrest, a backrest, a portion of the seat or a leg, or, in some cases, all four.

Still, the children make the most of what is left, even if it means turning their laps or window ledges into writing tables or balancing precariously on a wobbly chair all day long. It beats having to stand, sit on the floor or share a classmate's equally battered chair while lessons are given, as some students do. The children are also only too grateful that the days of sitting on tree trunks while holding classes under coconut trees as they did in June and July are over.

Converted into a national high school four years ago, the responsibility of meeting Guiuan National High School's classroom and armchair requirements falls squarely on the Department of Education, Culture and Sports. These days, however, that has unexpectedly been shifted to parents. Of the school's six three-classroom buildings, three are makeshift nipa structures that parents and students assembled hurriedly after Principal Corazon Obsequio appealed for their help. But because they had made the classrooms the priority, many parents, mostly poor fisherfolk, had no money to spare for their children's chairs.

Guiuan National High School is by no means the only public school that is reduced to waiting in vain each year for chairs from DECS. Like textbooks, classrooms and teachers, school desks and armchairs are in perennial shortage at the country's 40,000 public elementary and high schools. DECS statistics place the current shortage at 3.3 million pieces in elementary schools and 226,621 pieces in high schools.

The shortage exists despite the huge sums allotted each year to DECS for desk and armchair procurement. Since the late 1980s, the yearly budget for these items has averaged P250 million, peaking to P500 million in 1995 and 1996 when Ricardo Gloria was education secretary. Theoretically, the amount can buy at least 400,000 each year and roughly keep pace with the projected three percent annual increase in enrolment.

But the DECS budget seems outdated, considering that Congress nationalized all local high schools in 1989 and made the national government responsible for all their needs, and that DECS itself lowered to six years old the admission age for Grade 1 beginning 1994.

It hasn't helped that Congress has never thought of setting aside funds to repair about 300,000 dilapidated desks and armchairs that get retired each year. DECS gives desks and armchairs an average life span of three to four years.

The current shortage of school desks and armchairs, however, also stems partly from a string of bad and irregular transactions DECS has entered into with suppliers, and which have caused the government to lose millions of pesos every year.

A case in point is an P81.7-million contract with CKL Enterprises, a long-time supplier that got fully paid before deliveries were ever made. Indeed, it exemplifies a host of problems, including overpricing, delays and even ghost deliveries, that have besieged procurement contracts of the education department, as well as many other government agencies with sizable procurement budgets. The case also demonstrates how rules are bent, procedures ignored, and checks and balances removed in favor of a supplier who has chalked up a disreputable track record in fulfilling government contracts.

Obsequio recalls the last time DECS delivered armchairs was in 1996, when the school division in Borongan, the provincial capital, sent 29 plastic and steel armchairs. By then, however, Guiuan National High School already had 500 students.

Obsequio was still optimistic enough to expect a delivery of 500 all-plastic armchairs the following year. The chairs never came. This schoolyear, no chairs came as well. Meanwhile, the student population has climbed to 937.

Obsequio and other public school officials say the lack of chairs has taken a toll on the students' learning. According to Obsequio, classes get disrupted when a student, tired from standing or sitting on the floor, causes trouble by grabbing a schoolmate's chair. She also points out: "Because our students can't sit comfortably, they can't listen well to the lecture."

Officials in other schools also blame the high absenteeism among students partly on the shortage of chairs. At the Leyte National High School in Tacloban City-the biggest and supposedly best-equipped high school in Eastern Visayas-officials and teachers say scrambling for a seat each day has become a "disincentive" for some students to attend classes.

To be sure, that lack of schoolchairs can be traced back largely to CKL Enterprises that is owned by 53-year-old businesswoman Jesusa T. de la Cruz.

Two years after bagging the biggest contract to supply secondary armchairs and getting paid in full, CKL Enterprises has supplied only 40 percent of the 185,086 armchairs it pledged to deliver by April 24, 1997. It has not shipped a single armchair to Eastern Visayas, Western Visayas and Western Mindanao. Even in Metro Manila, where the chairs are made and shipped from, only 10 percent of the supposed beneficiaries have gotten their share.

The incomplete delivery has intensified the dearth of armchairs in public high schools nationwide because CKL's contract accounted for 41 percent of high school armchair requirements that DECS was scheduled to fill for schoolyear 1997-98.

For DECS and the Commission on Audit, the transaction was not just a simple "fast break"-full payment, no delivery-but it ingeniously employed a form of payment that government rarely resorts to for domestic suppliers: documentary letter of credit.

Who are behind what appears to be an anomalous arrangement is unclear. But in a move that has baffled the new set of education officials, Ombudsman Aniano Desierto last August cleared ex-Education Secretary Ricardo Gloria, former Education Undersecretary and now Western Samar Rep. Antonio Nachura and DECS chief accountant Blanquita Bautista of any criminal and administrative liability in letting CKL Enteprises get paid before deliveries were made.

Bautista had certified that funds were available for the transaction. Nachura, then chairman of the Pre/Post Qualification Bids and Awards Committee on the 1996 Desk/Armchair Project, entered into the contract with de la Cruz, allowed the payment by letter of credit and signed along with Gloria the disbursement voucher that transferred the money to Land Bank of the Philippines to cover the transaction. Gloria approved the contract and signed-even before deliveries were made-acceptance of the draft that became one of the bank's bases for paying CKL in full on Dec. 24, 1996.

According to the Ombudsman, DECS made no lapses in judgment, but Land Bank may have. "The bank concerned," said the resolution from the Ombudsman, "being a government banking institution, could have taken a vigilant role so as to obviate any attempt to defraud the government." The judgment astonished education officials and people familiar with bank practices.

But more to the point were questions as to how and why a company owned by de la Cruz, who had acquired a notorious reputation in DECS, got accredited, joined the bidding, and clinched the P81.7-million and several other multimillion-peso contracts before that-and then allowed an uncommon form of payment.

Jesusa T. de la Cruz of Binalonan, Pangasinan, owner of CKL Enterprises, used to be a small-time businesswoman in the 1970s. But until her latest caper attracted attention, she was one of the DECS's biggest contractors, supplying teachers' uniforms, school desks, office furniture and instructional materials. She was also into the construction of schoolbuildings in the early nineties.

Bautista, chief accountant of DECS since the mid-70s when Juan Manuel was education secretary, remembers de la Cruz's first few contracts covered curtains for Teachers Camp and the education department. De la Cruz had transacted business mainly under a company named Giomiche—a combination of her three children's names.

Shortly after getting affiliated with Nacida, De la Cruz chased contracts for teachers' uniforms and, occasionally, furniture. The budget for teachers' uniforms by then was running at about P50 million a year.

Giomiche's contracts for uniforms grew rapidly, allegedly with the help of a relative of de la Cruz in the administration division at the DECS central office. Department insiders say this DECS employee was closely related to the wife of an education undersecretary.

In the early 1980s, however, DECS discontinued the awarding of contracts for teachers' uniforms when it found that massive graft and corruption attended most transactions, says a former education undersecretary. Instead, the government released clothing allowances directly to teachers.

But de la Cruz was not one to give up easily. DECS old-timers recall that when then Education Minister Jaime C. Laya asked for proposed designs for teachers' uniforms, his administrative people got him to approve a set of designs prepared by Giomiche. They then sent the minister for his signature a circular awarding Giomiche the contract to supply the uniforms. Suspecting something irregular, Laya refused and ordered DECS to pay Giomiche the cost of the designs.

That was the last that was heard of de la Cruz at the DECS central office. By then, the economic crisis had also shrunk the procurement budget and the government began decentralizing purchases.

De la Cruz reportedly ran into financial problems in the months that followed. "At one point," Bautista recalls, "bumagsak ang negosyo niya (her business went in decline) " But a contract to renovate the Bureau of Treasury of Intramuros in the twilight years of the Marcos regime soon reinvigorated her company.

Post-EDSA education officials knew nothing about de la Cruz or Giomiche until they requested the National Bureau of Investigation to discreetly run a check on its National Capital Region office. They were dumbfounded when the NBI reported how procurement rules had been modified to allow one supplier to provide the lumber used for school desks. The supplier: de la Cruz.

According to a former assistant secretary, education officials acted quietly to cut de la Cruz's umbilical cord to DECS-NCR by not extending the terms of retiring regional officials. In place soon was a new set of officials who, having seen what became of their predecessors, were wary about awarding contracts to de la Cruz. It was already the '90s, and de la Cruz relocated the bulk her operations to Davao City. She opened an educational supply store and rented a factory that produced wooden furniture, including school desks.

At about that time, Venancio Nava, assistant director of DECS-NCR, was appointed director DECS-Region 11 based in Davao. Today, Nava, de la Cruz and a number of regional and division officials face criminal complaints before the Ombudsman, as well as charges in regional trial courts and the Sandiganbayan, for transactions made in 1991 and 1992 that COA calls "irregular."

The P81.7-million contract that de la Cruz was to obtain from DECS central office in 1996 is reminiscent of these transactions. COA-Region XI director Jimmy Naranjo notes, "The cases follow the same pattern: They (DECS) start paying before she makes full deliveries." This despite a strict prohibition in Presidential Decree 1455 on advance payments for procurement of supplies, materials, equipment and services without approval of the president.

Among the transactions questioned by COA is one involving Business International Wood Products Inc., a firm owned by de la Cruz and run by her son, Michael. In February 1992, the firm got paid P1,033,450 in full despite delivering to DECS-Region XI only P525,600 worth of office furniture. COA also says the purchase was done without public bidding, adding that no contract existed to justify the release of public funds to the company.

Nine months later, the DECS regional office again gave Business International Woods Products full payment of P2,081,700 despite getting only 1,176 of 3,084 graders' desks stipulated in the contract, COA reported.

Pending before the Ombudsman in Mindanao, meanwhile, is a complaint against DECS regional officials and Giomiche for the full payment given to de la Cruz before construction of elementary school buildings in Davao City, Davao del Sur, Davao del Norte, Davao Oriental, General Santos City, South Cotabato and Surigao del Sur was completed.

A number of purchases by DECS Region XI from de la Cruz's firms were also found to have questionable price tags. In 1991, auditors noted, Giomiche supplied the Davao City school division construction materials that were overpriced by as much as 695 percent. COA said the government got shortchanged by P512,967.70.

The following year, the same DECS regional office bought from Giomiche 14,671 dictionaries for P184 per copy. According to COA, the overprice was some 131 percent that translated to a loss of P1.5 million from the government. The state auditors also noted that the purchase was made without the benefit of public bidding.

But while the filing of the cases forced de la Cruz to lie low in Davao, she apparently became busy in neighboring Regions X and XII, where she managed to land government contracts. Not long after, de la Cruz was staging a big comeback, this time at the DECS central office under a new company name, CKL Enterprises.

Laments Naranjo:"These people have not learned their lessons."