By Gerardo R. Partido
Variety News Staff

THE Guam Education Policy Board reduced the Guam Public School System’s budget from $293 million to $234 million, and the board’s vice chairman yesterday said he wants GPSS to implement a pay freeze to stop the financial hemorrhaging in the education sector.
GEPB chairman Peter Alexis Ada and vice chairman Joe San Agustin were the guests at yesterday’s Guam Chamber of Commerce monthly meeting, and they took turns explaining the financial difficulties being experienced by GPSS.
Because of acute funding problems, Ada said the board has been meeting to continually chip away at the GPSS budget, canceling items that the public school system can do without.
From an original budget of $293 million, Ada said the board has been able to cut the budget to $234 million.
“And we hope to pare it down further to $220 million,” Ada said.
For his part, San Agustin said he wants GPSS to implement a freeze on pay to make the public school system’s finances more manageable.
He clarified, however, that such a freeze will only apply to future pay hikes and does not apply to the salary increases that were recently implemented.
Indignation has grown over GPSS salary increases at a time when the public school system is almost broke.
But according to GPSS Superintendent Luis Reyes, his administration had no choice but to implement the pay raises because they were mandated by law.
For future pay raises, however, San Agustin said a corresponding improvement in GPSS performance must be posted.
“We always get complaints that our pay scales do not correspond to the national average. But I will say this, we will pay national average salary scales as soon as we attain national average scores for our school children,” the vice chairman said to much applause.
He added that GPSS should strive to develop standard operating procedures so that it can raise its output and better monitor costs such as power bills.
“With more efficiency, we can reduce our maintenance costs by as much as 15 percent. We can even use federal grants to finance GPSS cell phones to free our local budget. Part of the savings we realize from these measures can be used to pay off our vendors in the private sector,” San Agustin said.
He admitted that, at this point, GPSS is still paying off 2006 bills owed to vendors.