MARIANAS High School is an educational institution that could be the source of the CNMI’s future engineers and craftsmen.
MHS teacher James S. Labausa takes pride in having 52 students in his construction class from the 9th to the 12th grades who practically do all the renovation and electrical needs of the school. Just last week, Labausa said the class finished renovating Building 102-A which will serve as the office of Principal Jim Denight, a teachers’ lounge and a copy machine room.
“They did all the painting. They fixed the windows, the doors and the ceiling. They also built the cabinet and the partitions for the office. Even the electrical pipings and wirings were done by my students. I just did the more dangerous part of tapping the pipes to the live wire,” said Labausa, an engineer who spent several years working for construction establishments in Saudi Arabia.
Labausa said MHS do not need to hire carpenters and electricians. His class also built the circular roof of the library, the canteen and the greenhouse and fences for the agricultural class.
At the MHS’s T Building, the skills of future craftsmen are being honed by teacher Jeff M. Cope, a master craftsman who specializes in industrial education and spent long years in teaching vocational education in American Samoa.
The enthusiasm of students in the cabinet-making class is immeasurable, according to Cope.
“But this is not a conducive place to work (in),” he said. “We don’t have insulation. The building’s roof is made of tin and during noon, my students’ shirts are soaked with sweat, but they still continue working,” he said.
What saddens Cope is the Public School System’s seeming lack of attention to vocational education.
“The enthusiasm of students is overflowing. But we don’t know until when, especially when they do not receive the much needed attention from PSS. Not once did I see Education Commissioner (Rita H.) Inos visit our class to know what are our needs and capabilities. We don’t even know who is the PSS director for vocational education” Cope said.
Since only 10 to 15 percent of high school graduates go to college, Cope said that perhaps, the government, with the guidance of PSS, should start placing vocational education on center stage.
“We complain that we rely too much on foreign labor. But I think that if we really want to have a self-reliant labor force, we should give attention to vocational education, help the children develop life-long skills from which they can both learn and earn. Who knows, from here, we can develop a domestic industry that could become the backbone of the CNMI economy?” Cope said.
Denight, in a separate interview, said there is no doubt that the basis of the CNMI economy could be developed through vocational education.
“We can have a viable local workforce based on vocational education. But we need to look and plan for this with a broader perspective. If students graduate, will employers hire them and how much are they going to be paid? Or are there jobs available to them? There may also be a need to develop and promote a work ethic that all kinds of job are valuable and worthwhile,” he said.
Daniel O. Quitugua, chairman of the House Committee on Education, also believes that the CNMI has to have a more dependable alternative work force to develop the economy.
“Garment and tourism are our two major industries, but we cannot for long rely on these industries. We have to find an alternative,” said Quitugua, R-Rota.
He observed that in the last 15 to 20 years, the government “did very little in promoting vocational education.”
“We seem to have this attitude of unconsciously promoting dependence on government employment. Consequently, we put only little emphasis in harnessing the skills of our students for employment in the private sector,” said the former education commissioner.
But Quitugua believes that it is not yet too late for the CNMI to address this problem. “There is always time, especially if there is already a realization by all concerned government agencies and officials that this should be prioritized and that the time is now,” he said.
Inos was unavailable for comment, but PSS spokesman Robert H. Myers says they are doing their best to promote vocational education. All it needs is additional funding to get things going, he said.
“To say that PSS is not supporting vocational education is incorrect. It did many projects to promote vocational education. PSS is one of the leading examples of an agency that has mission statements, clear planning, objectives and goals. It has the numbers to show what it did to promote vocational education. But the ship is tight thus you cannot expect that it has enough space to accommodate all educational needs,” he said.
