On student management PSS cites cultural concerns

Acting Education Commissioner Rita A. Sablan admitted one of the greatest challenges that continue to confront the Public School System is the Herculean task of providing the needs of close to 10,000 students from diverse cultures and ethnic backgrounds.

In a speech delivered at the recent education summit held on Saipan, Ms. Sablan said the school system is constantly faced with the challenge of tending to every student regardless of language, ability or disability, ethnicity, and other factors.

During the last academic year alone, the school system served a total of 9,692 students from Headstart, kindergarten, and Grades 1 to 12, hailing from over 14 different ethnic backgrounds.

“This in itself is a challenge to the school system,” said Ms. Sablan.

The acting commissioner said the number of students in need of special services are sharply increasing much more rapidly than the school system’s ability to hire classroom teachers specializing in certain subject areas like guidance counseling, student support services, and teacher substitutes.

At Saipan’s lone public junior high school, for instance, cultural diversity is also one reality students as well as teachers have to deal with everyday.

The junior high which is populated by over 1,350 students has under its wing a mixture of Chamorro, Carolinian, Federated States of Micronesia, Korean, and Filipino nationals.

“There’s a lot of what we call cultural simulation that to a certain degree makes the students develop different perceptions about their ethnicity and this is something we are all faced with,” a Hopwood teacher said.

According to a report card developed by the PSS Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment team, native Chamorros in public schools constitute more than half of the total student ethnic distribution at 57 percent.

Carolinians come in as the second largest ethnic group with over 1,203 out of 9,143 students as of academic year 1999-2000.

PSS statistics also reveal that 11 percent or some 980 of students in CNMI public schools are Filipinos, while the remaining 19 percent include the Chamolinians, Chuukese, Pohnpeians, Marshallese, Yapese, Koreans, Caucasians, Chinese, Japanese, and Europeans. Other nationalities comprise two percent or equivalent to 197 students in the public school system.