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Transportation is ‘biggest hurdle’ for co-op program students to overcome
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Posted on Aug 30 2021
For some students participating in the CNMI Public School System’s Cooperative Education Program, transportation to their job sites is a major challenge, said program coordinator Brandon Nicholas during a presentation to the Rotary Club of Saipan last Tuesday.
Touching on some of the program’s challenges and opportunities for growth—one of which is student transportation—Nicholas shared how the program currently fulfills students’ need for transportation, and how the program will continue to fulfill this need.
“My students have tremendous goals and aspirations but [for some], these goals and aspirations are only as far as they can walk away from home. …Transportation is something that a lot of my students shared as the biggest hurdle for them to overcome,” said Nicholas.
Currently, the program has one student transport van, but Nicholas said that it is currently undergoing repairs and maintenance. In the interim, Nicholas and the Northern Marianas Technical Institute have worked out an arrangement where NMTI lends its student transport van for the program to use.
With NMTI’s van, Nicholas said that the program was able to provide transportation for its participating students from Kagman High School during the last month of school last school year. Nicholas expressed his gratitude to NMTI interim chief executive officer Jodina Attao and her team, and said that the partnership with NMTI may extend into the current semester.
In a phone call with Attao on Wednesday, she said that she, Nicholas, and KHS principal Ben Jones worked out an agreement in April to lend NMTI’s student transport van to the Cooperative Education program.
The Cooperative Education Program is an elective class available in all of the CNMI’s high schools that aims to point students toward careers within the private and public sectors, preparing the future generation of workers, and in the long-term addressing the CNMI’s current labor shortage within the private sector.
