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NMC board to talk about resuming presidential search
With Super Typhoon Yutu interrupting its search for a new president, the Northern Marianas College Board of Regents will be talking about possibly resuming its presidential search, as repairs and the continuation of classes take priority after Yutu nearly destroyed its As Terlaje campus.
NMC Board of Regents chair Charles Cepeda told Saipan Tribune that the board is looking forward to discussing the continuation of their presidential search now that classes have moved back at their As Terlaje campus last Wednesday.
“We haven’t put the presidential search committee together because our main focus was recovery from the typhoon and where we are going to go after the typhoon hit,” Cepeda said in an interview.
Frankie Eliptico, NMC dean of Institutional Advancement, is currently the interim president of the CNMI’s lone community college.
“We are not in the position right now to set up the presidential search,” Cepeda said last Wednesday. He did say, however, that the Board of Regents is slated to meet this Thursday at their As Terlaje campus and the presidential search would be one of their topics for discussion.
“We’ve already checked with our accreditation board for the college and basically they [understood] our situation,” he said in response to questions about how long Eliptico will be the interim president. “We are under a different situation with Super Typhoon Yutu, [with] the campus being basically demolished.”
In a previous interview with Eliptico, he noted that 22 of NMC’s 27 on-campus buildings sustained severe damage, while only two of their 37 available classrooms survived Typhoon Yutu’s devastation in late October 2018.
“[Eliptico] was the one who helped bring up the temporary classrooms as being provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but we wanted him to be able to bring the students back to campus first before we look for a more permanent president,” Cepeda said.
