BOE urged to give ‘expenditure authority’ to Rota, Tinian principals

The CNMI of Board of Education has been urged to provide greater power to Rota and Tinian school principals by giving them the expenditure authority over their operational budgets.

This was the recommendation of the board’s School Reform Committee, chaired by Galvin Deleon Guerrero, after enumerating the “concerns” existing at the neighboring islands’ schools.

Deleon Guerrero, during Wednesday’s special board meeting, noted that the usual “long process” for school documentations to the Public School System’s central office is affecting the immediate delivery of services to the students.

“It was recommended that principals on Rota and Tinian should have expenditure authority for school operations throughout the year…It appears that processing expenditure requests through PSS central office consumes too much time and thereby jeopardizes school operations,” he told the board.

The PSS education commissioner is assigned as the expenditure authority of the school’s personnel and operations budget.

Though there was a previous try to transfer this power to school principals, this didn’t pass the Legislature as recommended by the education board.

Deleon Guerrero said the recommendation was primarily initiated because of the “time factor.”

In recent visits to these schools, the committee chairman disclosed that there are dangerous roof holes and water leaks at Sinapalo Elementary School that pose serious safety risks to students.

“It is our understanding that funds have been allocated to address this problem, but there has been a delay in processing this CIP project,” Deleon Guerrero said, adding that the project must be expedited as quickly as possible to ensure the safety and welfare of the students at the school.

Deleon Guerrero also found out that there is only one functioning 66-passenger bus on Rota which is woefully inadequate for the estimated 519 students enrolled in Sinapalo, Rota Junior High School, and Rota High School.

As an alternative, he added, students are transported around in PSS vans, which are not intended for such use.

“PSS and the BOE must explore ways to provide adequate buses on Rota,” he added.

In his committee meetings with the schools’ stakeholders, Deleon Guerrero said many of them believe that neither PSS nor Northern Marianas College have provided adequate vocational education.

“While PSS has a vocational education component to its curriculum, and while many classes and programs incorporated vocational education into lessons, PSS does not link these vocational education components with the broader component,” the committee head informed the board.

He said except for a few schools, there is no comprehensive interface between PSS and the broader business/industrial community in the form of internships and apprenticeships.