School principal Julian Hofschneider yesterday said the 314 new desks and chairs will be distributed to the classrooms when the new school year begins in September.
The school received $26,986 in federal community development block grant.
According to Hofschneider, the new desks will be used by the kindergarten to third grade students.
He lauded the efforts of Northern Marianas Housing Corp. Director Joshua Sasamoto and NMHC board member Antonio Borja of Tinian for securing the funding assistance.
Tinian expects to have the same enrollment figure of 305 this school year.
It has 15 classroom teachers of whom 13 are highly qualified — all ready for the opening of classes on Sept. 8.
Although it needs a special education specialist, the recruitment process is ongoing and Hofschneider is optimistic that they will hire a qualified applicant.
The school has 17 classrooms which include rooms for the bilingual program and the reading resource center.
Hofschneider said they want to build a new building for the physical education activities of students and a parent resource center that may also serve as student council office.
“We really want to have an indoor facility for our students where they can still do the physical activities every day. It is our hope that in the near future, we can have them built here on our campus,” he said.
Last school year, Tinian Elementary School received educational tax credit donations of over $14,000 which it used to buy supplies and drinking water for students.
The school gets a $10,000 operational budget from the government, but Hofschneider said this is not enough.
Despite limited funding, he said the school continues to provide good education to its students as indicated by their SAT-10 and SBA test results.
Tinian’s third graders had the third highest score of 59 percentile in SAT-10 for school year 2007-2008, next to Gregorio T. Camacho with 78 percentile and the second highest, Koblerville Elementary School with 64.
Tinian’s fifth graders had the second highest overall score of 49 percentile next to GTC with 66 percentile.
Tinian’s sixth graders, for their part, had the third highest score with 57 percentile, next to GTC’s 61 percentile, which had the highest, and San Vicente with 59 percentile.
Hofschneider said their school has a maximum of 20 students per classroom teacher.
“The success of our school is based on our good relationship with the stakeholders and active parental involvement,” he said. “I believe that reading with the children at home is the key to success in the content areas.”
