KUDOS to Vice Speaker Justo Quitugua for dissuading the chairman of the Board of Education from returning to a failed policy of hiring nonresident teachers, simply because of current, synthetic, budget problems.
The very first issue presented to me when I was sworn into office as a member of the board in Jan. 1995 was the U.S. Department of Justice class-action lawsuit against the Board of Education for “purposely pursuing a policy of discrimination” against nonresident teachers. It was shocking.
At the request of a group of nonresident teachers from Rota, I visited that beautiful island only to find a group of four or five Filipino teachers who were being forced to live in a single house in Songsong that was in terrible disrepair. I then visited the home of a stateside teacher who was living in Sinapalo with his wife and two children in a beautiful house that was well cared for. Both the Filipinos and the haole had the same contracts, giving them each a housing benefit. The racism was blatant. The problem was the lack of concern on the part of the then-commissioner of education, which led to his termination, and the principals involved.
We also found instances of other principals who were satisfied with pushing out highly qualified, aggressive stateside teachers and replacing them with more “compliant” nonresident teachers who would take on all the auxiliary duties required of teachers, such as lunch room duty, playground duty and parking lot duty. There are some principals who would fall into that trap again, if given the opportunity.
I wanted to fight the court case because of the slander it would cause against the commonwealth. Nevertheless, then-Gov. Froilan C. Tenorio decided to take the issue away from Public School System and had his own specially hired assistant attorney general negotiate a settlement behind our backs. Then-BOE Chairman Daniel Quitugua and BOE member Dino Jones signed off on it for the board while I was off island. It cost the CNMI $2.1 million. More important to me, the CNMI now holds a special distinction in the judicial archives as having paid the highest judgment in history for violations of the U.S. Civil Rights Act.
Shortly after I became chairman of the board in 1997, I received a letter from then-speaker of the House of Representatives advising me that Public Law 7-45 was about to expire and asking me if the Public School System wanted another extension of their exemption from hiring nonresident workers. This provided an opportunity for positive change.
At the following board meeting I presented the letter to the members of the board. I asked then-Commissioner William Torres how many nonresident teachers were employed by PSS. He told me 168. I then asked Rita Sablan, who was our number one recruiter at the time, if she and her team could recruit 168 qualified teachers who were U.S. citizens before the opening of the next school year. She said yes. I called for the vote of confidence in Rita, and the board voted, unanimously as I remember, not to renew any nonresident contracts and to recruit qualified U.S. citizens to fill all those positions.
The existing policy clearly also discriminated against the local teachers. Contract teachers, including non-residents, received a housing allowance, as much as $700 a year, whereas the Chamorro and Carolinian teachers paid for their own housing. I then proposed to the board that the housing allowance should be eliminated and proposed an across the board salary increase of $700 a month for all teachers. The board also agreed to this, and the pay raise was passed.
Of course, even with the subtraction of the cost of housing allowances, more money was needed to make the plan work. The PSS staff worked hard preparing a realistic budget for quality education in the CNMI. We submitted that budget to the Legislature. Without conducting a public hearing, they passed a different budget that didn’t even take our budget proposal into consideration. As some may remember, I took the liberty of throwing their budget in the trash.
Fortunately, both houses of the Legislature saw fit to meet the following day in back-to-back sessions to pass our budget as submitted. Rita Sablan fulfilled her commitment. All teaching positions were filled by the beginning of the next school year. Although I became persona non-grata among the nonresident teachers that year, I was pleased that in the four years after I left the board, the CNMI students achieved the highest standards, both academically and athletically, that they had ever scored. It was because we had a good mix of highly qualified Guamanian and stateside teachers working side-by-side with our local teachers who picked up techniques from being associated with master teachers.
More important, the increased salary for local teachers caused a great influx in the number of students participating in the Northern Marianas College/UOG teacher education program. As result, the great majority of at least elementary teachers in the CNMI today are local U.S. citizens.
There is no need for the Board of Education to take a step backwards. Rather, it is time for the elected Board of Education of the autonomous Public School System to stand up for quality education and force the Legislature to make the budget changes necessary to ensure that the Public School System receives not only adequate, but ample funds for education.
The problem with turnover rate at some schools, such as the chronic problem at Tinian Jr./Sr. High School, is a problem with the principals. As with coaches, if you have a principal who can not recruit and maintain a competent team, find one who can. They certainly get paid enough to perform well.
Representative Quitugua, please continue keeping a close eye on education and please work with your colleagues to streamline the top-heavy administration and provide adequate funds for quality education.

DON A. FARRELL
Marpo Heights, Tinian