Alfred Ada, Kagman High School principal, said Deleon Guerrero was just doing his job to help schools identify problems.
School principals, however, described the report as inaccurate and Ada said Deleon Guerrero should have examined the veracity of the data before disclosing the report to the pubic.
“But I don’t think he intentionally reported the wrong data,” Ada told Variety.
Saipan Southern High School vice principal Craig H. Garrison, said Deleon Guerrero already knew the report was flawed and yet still disclosed it.
Before Deleon Guerrero submitted the report to BOE, Garrison said they presented data to the board member.
But Garrison said Deleon Guerrero “was not trying to do harm to the school system.”
Like Ada and Garrison, Marianas High School principal Karen Borja and other school officials do not believe that Deleon Guerrero used the report to further his political agenda.
Ignacia Demapan, Kagman Elementary School principal, said the report’s data didn’t show what had taken place before the suspension.
“It seemed that we don’t go through the process, and that we just suspend students, and we did not hold conferences with the students and parent,” she said.
Schools, she added, will exhaust all initiatives and observe due process before resorting to suspension of students.
Ada and Borja said the report’s data should be corrected.
“We need to do to define what are the minor and the major infractions that result in suspension,” Ada said.
Garrison said he doesn’t care about the report and will instead focus on the daily activities of his school and students.
“I know from my office what the real data is,” he added.
He said the person reporting the data to BOE failed to properly investigate and verify the information with the sources at the school-level even after being given the opportunity to do so.
“It is this type of erroneous and reckless reporting that can often skew the image of public schools and thus inhibit the system from gaining support in the public sector. The numbers reported were taken from actual totals of infractions and not actual suspensions,” he said.
As a corrective measure, Ada said, they will trace back their school data to define the details and number of offenders.
