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BOE must go back to Legislature for teacher rep designation
The CNMI State Board of Education would like Gov. Eloy S. Inos to appoint the years-vacant teacher representative position via executive order, but the governor has deferred to the attorney general’s opinion, which says the process for selecting the representative must be established by law before he or she could be validly appointed.
“Any appointment made prior to the passage of such law would not be valid. Accordingly, I cannot appoint a teacher representative at this time,” Inos told board chair Herman T. Guerrero in a Nov. 25 letter.
The process for which a teacher rep is selected may be the hurdle BOE faces in getting the position filled. In earlier letters to the governor, Guerrero wrote that it has been an “ongoing struggle to motivate the Legislature to act in a coherent matter.”
BOE and the Public School System have pushed that the CNMI Teacher of the Year be appointed teacher rep. However, as reported earlier, the Legislature has recommended that an election be held among teachers to determine their representative on the board.
The board has rejected this recommendation. Earlier, the board drafted an executive order for the governor that would create a system where the governor would appoint the teacher selected by his or her colleagues as ‘Teacher of the Year” as the non-voting teacher representative on the board.
The teacher rep would serve a one-year term, according to the order.
However, Attorney General Gilbert Birnbrich found that the Constitution requires that law provide the process. Because of this, the appointment of the public school teacher representative “is not self-executing,” and Inos cannot validly appoint a teacher rep.
Guerrero reported the opinion to the board at their meeting on Wednesday. He said they would “just have to wait ’til the new Legislature” next year to continue their efforts to get a teacher rep designated.
There has been no teacher representative on the board since January 2008.
In 2009, the CNMI Constitution was amended to have the process of establishing a selection process for teacher representative be the responsibility of the Legislature.
