‘PSS school buildings are not to electrical code’

Electrical systems for many buildings in the Public School System are “not to code,” according to CIP coordinator for PSS Rachel Fusco.

“If you look at the age of some of these schools and then you look at what’s there, maybe it was okay 30, 40 years ago but it’s not modernized, it hasn’t been brought up to code or acceptable standard,” she said.

As reported earlier, the Office of Insular Affairs, in its 2013 assessment of buildings and classrooms, provided a table for “health and safety concerns” for priority attention that flagged PSS 57 times for “hazardous conditions” under “electrical” deferred maintenance among 18 schools surveyed.

Fusco said that most of this “urgent health and safety deferred maintenance”—which amounts to $1.3 million—found by OIA in its report, will be electrical work, noting that electrical upgrades as schools age and more computers are used in classrooms.

She said that based on the cost of projects in the CNMI, as well as the cost of past PSS projects in the last 10 years, OIA came up with broad estimates of how much it would take to address all of PSS’ renovations.

OIA has advised insular governors to set aside $1 million every year for five years from its annual federal Capital Improvement Project funds to address issues raised in the report.

To address these issues, the Board of Education this year approved the OIA ABC initiative, with the first $1 million that PSS will be allocated to cover the “urgent health and safety deferred maintenance” that was identified, according to Fusco as well Education Commissioner Dr. Rita Salban.

OIA ranked deferred maintenance needs from 1 to 5, with five being acceptable and 1 being of urgent priority.

On the five-year window recommended by OIA for these projects, Fusco said PSS is addressing its deferred maintenance in the order of “critical needs,” noting that PSS has decided to address the “1s” with the first million, and all the “2s,” which equal to about $4 million in costs, to be taken cared of from years 2 to 5.

She said a plan and timeframe is still in the works for the first year phase, noting that it may vary for the different PSS schools.

“MHS might need a bigger overhaul as opposed to Dandan [Middle School] which is newer,” she said.

She also emphasized that OIA’s assessment was just a “snapshot in time,” and that as the report read, all the deferred maintenance common to the insular areas and the CNMI can be attributed “to [lack of] funding, harsh weather, and our locations.”

“If we do all the ‘2s’ in years 2 to 5, we still have to make sure that everything is kind of addressed, so at the same time we don’t keep recurring these large amounts of deferred maintenance,” she said.

Other than electrical needs, from an order of most cited “hazardous conditions,” other areas of priority found by OIA are structure, exterior, plumbing, roofing, interior, and mechanical.

The second most flagged priority need, behind “electrical,” was “structure,” which was flagged 14 times.

Both “structure” and “electrical” lead associated deferred maintenance costs with $.36 million of $1.3 million in urgent health and safety deferred maintenance attributed to “electrical,” while $.38 million in deferred maintenance costs is cited for “structure.”

Kagman Elementary School was flagged 11 times for electrical “hazardous” conditions, while the then-San Vicente Elementary School was flagged 10 times, according to OIA.

While Fusco and Commissioner Sablan earlier noted age as the cause for the constant need for repairs, KagES, with the highest number of hazardous conditions identified, based on the years since it opened, is much younger than SVES which is more than 40 years old, according to OIA’s findings on PSS school ages in their final assessment summary report.

KagES is around 15 years old based on the year the school opened, according the OIA graph.

PSS schools are 36 years old on average, according to OIA.

Specifics or details explaining these “hazardous” conditions were not provided in OIA documents available to Saipan Tribune, and the CIP office did not elaborate on the effects or dangers of these conditions as they affect each school.