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.

Green light

THESE organizational problems probably hold true at the Department of Public Safety as well, where officials gave the copper thieves a green light when they announced recently that all investigative resources were dedicated to solving a homicide case. This public announcement gave the copper thieves an “Advance To Go (Collect $200)” card, and away the thieves went, relieving CUC of copper wire at 12 water wells, among an untold number of other thefts.
On Guam, the copper thieves were nabbed within weeks. Our DPS officials might also want to note that the thieves here can handle “hot wire,” removing copper from power lines. They are also knowledgeable enough to know that water wells have copper wire and they know how to remove it.
Now if local investigative resources have been sapped by a single homicide case, maybe DPS officials should call the federal investigators for assistance. The public paid for the equipment and materials that the copper thieves are taking, and will have to ante up again to replace the equipment that was damaged or removed. Residents are already paying more than any U.S. jurisdiction for average power usage — must they pay still more for these thefts and the cost of replacement?

Worth cultivating

INCREASES in the number of Russian tourists seem to be the one bright spot on the horizon. These visitors are independent travelers, renting cars, frequenting restaurants and stores, and they stay for longer periods of time and spend more money while they are here, converting petro-dollars to tourist dollars for the CNMI.
This is a market worth cultivating.