Garrison slams House committee

Marianas High School principal Craig Garrison slammed members of the House Education Committee for entertaining what he describes as “outlandish and frivolous accusations” lodged by a few individuals, which contradicts the committee’s statement that it is responding to the concerns of many.

“It was clear that it was responding to nothing more than a letter by James [Yangetmai] and one which was fabricated with lies. It’s shameful. If the committee was really interested in the truth it would have been better served to simply pick up the phone or stop by for clarification,” said Garrison in his 19-page rebuttal testimony to the education panel Wednesday.

He said if the committee is truly concerned to get to the bottom for the true picture, members could have talked to many staff and students by walking the halls of MHS.

“…But I guess that’s not what you really wanted. You’d rather subject to succumbing to lies and innuendo of family and disgruntled teachers. Again, its unfortunate. There are a million other stories which for the most part fall under the heading ‘gossip’ as seemingly all of this does, which I don’t have the time to share,” the principal told lawmakers in his letter.

Garrison said he has done nothing more than aggressively try to fix a school that was broken, where teachers had a long history of abusing the system and its students, where the staff had a long history of taking anything that wasn’t nailed down and not coming to work, where no one gave a damn about the students or the environment that students had to work in.

“The fact that this job was dumped on me with 32-hour notice and that I was still able to achieve an insurmountable amount of progress and success not only with test scores but with school climate and the facilities all within a single year is a testimony in itself. And if a few teachers get pissed off along the way, so be it, they probably weren’t teachers in the first place,” added Garrison.

He said he was truly disappointed in the conduct of Yangetmai and other teachers who keep raising unfounded accusations against him.

One of Garrison’s comments in his testimony was his alleged changing of students’ grades, which he denied, saying the true story was never presented.

He pointed out that one of his teachers, whom he said had 51 days of absences out of 180 instructional days, gave a failing grade to 102 of 107 students—almost covering four classes.

“I did not ask the teacher to change the grades…what I was telling the teacher is there’s something wrong in what he’s doing and he needs to make some changes [in his teaching methods],” explained Garrison, adding that he decided to transfer the students to other classes after this teacher asked for a two-week leave.

Garrison also revealed that one of those who testified in the previous hearing defended MHS employees who allegedly stole school property because he was a member of the family.

The principal also revealed that another teacher who testified against him had been allegedly caught watching porn video on campus and has a bad history in other schools.

“I have always expressed my desire to see that people like these are removed from our public schools permanently,” added Garrison.