‘All Teachers Fully Supported’

For the “No Child Left Behind” in education to work, the flip side of the coin, “ All Teachers Fully Supported,” must be in place.

San Vicente Elementary School’s Reunion Night Friday saw every dignitary residing in the village who has had anything to do with the school show up. The dignitaries were joined by parents and guardians of students of various ethnic identities. The villagers came to support the school with their presence. They also gleefully cheered their young as the latter MTV’d themselves in the school stage grounds. For the night’s program, even the risqué Ocho-Ocho was transformed into amusing innocence in the hips and bellies of the young.

They bought packed dinner boxes, a fundraiser to get the school duplicating machine working and adequately supplied with toner and paper. Money makes the school go round! This is not lost to BOE member and former Chair Herman T. Guerrero. If I hear him right, he wants us to know, the governor included, that it is not enough to have an education line item in the budget. The executive branch must make sure we get the money!

At our school, administrators, teachers and parents are scrambling to raise enough monies for repairs of facilities and procurement of needed equipment. Often, teachers dig into their own pockets. The Governor’s Education Initiative allows for reimbursement of teachers’ expenses. A colleague submitted a claim in November and got her refund mid-May with an accompanying letter stating that this reimbursement was to cut short the procurement process normally followed. Gives you an idea how long it takes normally to get a box of paper clips!

Hillary Clinton had it right when she observed that “it takes a village to raise a child.” I watched the evening festivities convinced that it takes a community to make a school. More importantly, it takes a village to fully support a teacher.

Last week, the SVES graduating class of 2004 went on a four-day retreat that saw them clean up a portion of Lau Lau Beach. They learned how a newspaper is put together and printed, visited the Museum, lunched with man’amkos, planted grass by the 13 Fishermen monument on Beach Road to stem lagoon pollution, and had fun at the bowling alley—all at their own expense. For some, the cost meant almost 10 hours worth of parents’ wages but the field trips were educational, and parents, students and teacher valued it enough to pay for it!

In another context, our very own SVES parent BOE Chair Ramon Benavente said: “Education is not only the teachers’ job but parents as well.” Engaging parents’ support materially and their partnership with the curriculum has become a necessity.

To gain substantial support, teachers would be best served if they were better organized. While there are some of us who may take exception to the way our BOE Teachers’ Rep goes about creating a common front, it does remain to be the only active show in town.

The BOE Teachers’ Rep graced us with his presence at SVES’ Reunion Night. He reminded us of the teachers’ meeting this Saturday at the Multi-Purpose Center in Susupe to pursue his publicly stated “collective bargaining” agenda. I certainly would hope that teachers take the time to attend, if only to register their views, one way or the other.

We pass on this caution uttered among teachers who feel that currently there exists a “we ex-mainland collective/union conscious teachers are doing you other teachers (i.e., locals et al) a favor by insisting on a feature that is taken for granted elsewhere, which is the right to collective bargaining.” Twenty years ago, I was pastor of the Guam United Methodist Church whose members featured prominently in the creation of the island’s Teachers’ Union. The polarization that prevailed 20 years ago lingers to this day. Replication is hardly in order.

If “No-Child-Left Behind” is our focus, then teachers’ support in that endeavor is the issue. Placed in this context, the relationship between teachers, as a unit of labor, to BOE/PSS administrators, as management, takes a different flavor. It makes it clear that teachers are the frontline troops in teaching children how to learn. Everyone else is a support force.

This has clear operational implications. Partnership would be the mode of systemic operations with the ground and frontline troops taking the lead role. Local school teachers and personnel must be empowered to be self-reliant, self-sustaining and self-confident.

On the Feds’ side of the village, (they support up to 40 percent of State’s education budgets), we can start turning the table around so that federally-funded programs serve the locals before the locals overwhelm themselves just scurrying to fulfill the Fed’s requirements. Local confidence can easily tame the wild and often conflicting nature of federal regs.

Would that the Feds and PSS central office personnel’s first response to local needs be: “How can we help?” rather than the too common retort of, “You do not meet the necessary requirements!,” or worst, “You did not fill up the form properly!”

Would that the local Board would say to the Feds, “This is what we will do, and this is how we want you to assist!”

Would that the admin office’s basic response to any assistance request be, “Yes! Now, let us both work on the how!”

With the CNMI village, we need to locate a reliable and consistent tax base for education. In other places, it comes from a broad tax base called real estate. Admittedly, that would not be the case in the CNMI since land ownership is a domain of a limited few. Nor is the health of current loans collateralized by land in good shape to warrant taxing them further. We witness often enough the charade of foreclosures only to have loans refinanced, renewing the whole process of defaults all over again. Past revenue allocation had not guaranteed that what is collected is allocated as originally intended even by law.

Still, land is a non-depreciating asset. Current land ownership arrangement is temporary. Emerging in other countries is the sense of land stewardship rather than ownership. As a futuric trend, it would be worth our while to start thinking in the same direction. To think structural support for education, we need to start tapping into this resource.

Bipolarity connects to generate energy, power, vigor and vitality, and in education, this occurs at the student-teacher contact point. To orchestrate waves of support from the Feds to the parents converging at that point would revolutionize how we do ‘public education.’

Teachers need to rally their support. It begins with taking full ownership of the process and dynamic of getting the contact point between students and teachers to take place. Other tasks to that central encounter is subsidiary.

The contact point where student and teacher meets, resides in a village. It takes a village to teach a child, and it takes a village to support a teacher!