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Sablan sells HLI 18-12 to business crowd
A high number of children do not have the opportunity to go to kindergarten programs on island, according to Education Commissioner Dr. Rita Sablan.
“Close to 40 percent that would have been eligible for kindergarten are actually not in kindergarten because we don’t have the classrooms or the teachers,” she said, addressing the business community at yesterday’s general membership meeting of the Saipan Chamber of Commerce.
Sablan said she hoped the passing of House Legislative Initiative 18-12, which raises the minimum percentage of local appropriation for PSS from 15 percent to 25 percent, would help expand the public schools’ kindergarten program and make it accessible to every 5-year-old child in the CNMI.
Initiatives to be pushed with the passing of HLI 18-12 is the improvement of classroom instructional material and technology, class-size reduction, and repair, renovation and modernization of school buildings and classrooms.
On class-size reduction, she told the crowd the student-teacher ratio has gone to as high as 50:1 in Hal Easton’s Marianas High School classroom.
For English and Language Arts, teachers face a student-teacher ratio 31:1 on average, she said.
“The funding [HLI 18-12] is really to reduce class sizes so every teacher will be teaching 20 to 1 in the elementary [schools] and 25 to 1 in our high schools,” she said.
She told the business crowd that “the greatest investment” PSS could offer them is the education of the CNMI’s children.
