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‘MOE issue would have lessened PSS budget’
Of the $33.44 million that will be given to the Public School System next fiscal year, $3.4 million should have been allocated to pay for maintenance-of-effort agreement payments for fiscal 2010 and a portion of fiscal 2011, according to Gov. Eloy S. Inos in his comments on Public Law 18-66.
If the Legislature had seen to the governor’s request, PSS would instead have about a $30-million budget for fiscal 2015.
“[The $3.4 million] would not have been addition to but [mean] less local appropriation. This would have reduced PSS funding for [fiscal 2015] from last year,” Board of Education chair Herman Guerrero said asked for his interpretation of the comment.
He also took notice of the governor’s means to pay for the MOE payment.
“I’m not sure that was the intent of the MOE,” he said in meeting the MOE payment not as addition to but in subtraction to the PSS budget compared to last year.
“It makes me wonder if the governor supports public education as guaranteed by the constitution,” he said.
An estimated $9 million to $11 million is owed PSS under the MOE, in a recent statement by Delegate Gregorio Kilili C. Sablan (Ind-MP), who pushed for the Legislature to meet MOE requirements earlier this year.
He noted that a consequence of breaking the MOE agreement, which the CNMI agreed to in 2009 in accepting the $44 million State Fiscal Stabilization Fund grant from the U.S. Department of Education, is that the federal government may withhold future grants to recover this $44 million in SFSF money.
“That would put hundreds of Commonwealth government employees’ jobs on the line,” he said then.
