MAJURO — Public and private schools in the Marshall Islands are going to feel major funding cuts beginning Oct. 1 if the currently proposed Ministry of Education budget is approved.
Private school principals, facing cancellation of an annual $300,000 aid to private schools allotment, are voicing concerns about the need for the government to inject more money into education in the coming fiscal year.
“Previous budgets have been inadequate and this current budget proposal will not cover the needs of the children of the Marshall Islands,” Education Secretary Biram Stege told the government’s Budget Coordination Committee recently. To meet the government Budget Committee’s funding ceiling for the ministry, Stege said she “had to reduce or ignore key items of expenditure.”
Minister Wilfred I. Kendall said that the government is legally required to devote more funding to grades 1 to 8, but that the approximately $9 million allocated to education by the government does not allow The Ministry of Education to meet its constitutional requirement. He described the $9 million budget ceiling as a “decrease” in funding compared to last year.
“We’re coming to tough times,” he said.
On the hit list for total elimination starting Oct. 1 are:
• Aid to private schools that normally amounts to about $300,000 annually.
• Funds to improve deteriorating and, in some cases, collapsing, school facilities at the two largest public high schools in Majuro and Jaluit.
• All funds for school text books.
Materials for students are to be reduced to “a minimal allocation only,” Stege said.
The new budget provides no funding for the start of “urgently needed kindergarten services, which would have begun to help bring students entering grade one up to standard.”
There will also be no funds for urgently required furniture for public elementary schools, and no increase in funds for the College of the Marshall Islands.
Finally, Stege said the budget allows the ministry to bring up the salaries of only two-thirds of the teaching staff to the Public Service Commission legally required pay scale.
Kendall said an important goal of the ministry has been to get the salaries of its teaching staff into line with PSC pay levels. “We need to get teachers’ salaries up to speed with the rest of the public service,” he said. But even with the major cuts proposed by the education ministry to meet the budget ceiling, it won’t be possible to do the coming fiscal year.
“Education and health are the government’s main priorities and yet the amount of money actually going to education in the Marshall Islands is pretty pitiful,” said Fr. Richard McAuliff, the pastor for Assumption Schools.
Government officials assign funding for what they feel are priority areas, said Seventh Day Adventist High School principal Jeff Brown. “So that’s (the cut in aid to private schools) making a statement that they don’t see education as a priority,” he said. “I expect a lot of people to make a pretty big outcry. We will speak up and help the government to see that this is not a wise thing to do.”
Although the aid to private school is normally in the $300,000 range each year, and is shared by the many private schools in operation in the Marshall Islands, the $15,000-$25,000 provided to each school is often the difference in a school surviving the year without a deficit.
“It will be a tough year for us if they’re not going to give us any funding,” said Majuro Cooperative School Principal Alice Capelle. “We will have to have more fund-raising or have a higher tuition in place.”
McAuliff observed that the amount of money the private schools—which currently educate approximately 60 percent of all high school students in the country—save the national government is “incredible.”
Kendall agreed. “If there weren’t any private schools in the Marshall Islands, the government would have to spend an extra $3 million-to-$4 million,” Kendall said.
There’s no question that the private schools are helping the government deliver education, he said, adding that it wasn’t by choice that the ministry proposed cutting aid to private schools but rather it was necessitated by the budget ceiling proposed for education by the national government for the next fiscal year.
Private school principals said they hesitated to raise tuition. “We will try and keep tuition as low as possible to make (education) available to as many students as possible,” Fr. Rich said.
