By Zaldy Dandan
Variety Editor

THE chairman of the Board of Education just made the most powerful argument for term limits when he put forward yet another argument for the Public School System to be exempt from the law requiring that the government hire U.S. citizens. It took over a decade for the Legislature to overcome the politics that actually discouraged the CNMI government from hiring U.S. citizens, falling back on the tired budget excuse until recently. Credit goes to Vice Speaker Justo S. Quitugua and his colleagues for recognizing that perpetuating this practice may be easy on the budget, but does little to promote the development of local human resources. Employment trends are moving toward the hiring of U.S. citizens, a point the U.S. Congress is trying to make, but somehow the import of this message is still lost on some of our leaders.
Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on television infomercials that primarily showcase education administration officials and the wisdom of their policies, PSS should spend this money on teachers and students.
But top education officials are divorced from the day-to-day realities of the work-a-day world. They talk freely and often about putting the education of our children first, but engage in intramural politics that dooms the system to mediocrity. While school administrators and teachers come face to face with the hardship of providing solid instruction and care of these island’s children all day, every day, PSS administrators settle back into hiring friends and family members, inexperienced and sometimes unqualified staff, concentrating power in the hands of a few trusted staff, to the detriment of the system as a whole.