BOE: Govt owes PSS $10.3M

The Board of Education meeting yesterday reignited talks about the CNMI government owing money to the CNMI Public School System.

What used to be debt of only around $4 million has ballooned to $10.3 million, as confirmed by Federal Programs officer Tim Thornburgh.

The discussion of the debt started when BOE member Marylou Ada asked, “Why did we stop asking for the maintenance-of-effort funding?”

BOE chair Herman Guerrero replied they never did. The CNMI Constitution states that at least 25 percent of CNMI general revenues is to be appropriated to the budget of PSS.

“The problem with some members of the Legislature is they keep thinking that the 25 percent is the max they can give us. I said no, that is not the intent of the Constitution. That’s the minimum; it cannot go below but it can go up. There is still resistance with the members—even the current ones—that still don’t think we need the funds,” he said.

“I think that’s why we need to include it in our budget submission—what the schools identify as their basic needs—including Capital Improvement Projects, so that the Legislature knows that we are not lying when we throw it out there because they think we have too much money and don’t need to address [maintenance-of-effort],” he added.

Ada suggested to Guerrero that the CNMI government should be reminded of this debt.

“I think it has been a quiet issue and we should start revisiting that and start making a dialogue with the Legislature and the governor because it is an unresolved issue—we’ve been talking about this for years,” she said. “We got to bring this back up to the table so that whatever the government owes us they pay us because revenues are up. We need that money to fix our infrastructure.”

Ada said that the issue has been going on ever since she first joined the BOE, which was seven years ago. Talk of a lawsuit against the CNMI government has even come up.

“We’ve waffled whether we are going to pursue this or not pursue this, which even came to a point where we sought the legal counsel’s opinion on this and do something or not,” said Tanya King, another BOE member.

Ada said the issue has not been brought up with Gov. Ralph DLG Torres but now is the perfect time to do so.

“We have not been talking about this with the present governor, but we’ve been talking about this with the past governor and [nothing happened]. Now that we have money up there with the economy growing, I think we should get all the money that we can at this point and really start working on the infrastructures,” she said.

During the time of former governor Benigno R. Fitial, former U.S. president George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, which reauthorizes the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act that focused mainly on the funding of public education, which was later replaced by President Barack Obama’s Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. The NCLB allocated a certain amount for PSS, on the promise of the local government that it would provide funding for maintenance-of-effort to renovate school buildings. The CNMI government has not done so.