{"id":232619,"date":"2016-07-20T06:06:19","date_gmt":"2016-07-19T20:06:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=232619"},"modified":"2016-07-20T06:06:19","modified_gmt":"2016-07-19T20:06:19","slug":"blanco-sarc-needs-point-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/blanco-sarc-needs-point-person\/","title":{"rendered":"Blanco: SARC needs a point person"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Students<\/a>
Students Attendance Review Committee chair John Blanco delivers his brief report about the concerns they reported to the CNMI State Board of Education in last week\u2019s BOE membership meeting at the Napu Room of the Pacific Islands Club Saipan. (Jon Perez)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Student Attendance Review Committee chair John Blanco is hoping that the CNMI State Board of Education would hire or appoint full-time staff that would act as the group\u2019s point person since all of the members are volunteers.<\/p>\n

Going out and finding ways on how to get students who are having a hard time going to school to attend their classes is SARC\u2019s primary task. Their members are all volunteers. Public Law 16-47, or the Juvenile Justice Act, created the committee but it is placed under the BOE. <\/p>\n

Blanco has submitted SARC\u2019s report to the BOE where he is hoping officials would consider their suggestion of appointing more members since they are short in manpower.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are an organization made up of volunteers and we have a lot on our plate. We don\u2019t have a person that would set up the meetings and would make the calls reminding us to attend,\u201d said Blanco, who is also Mt. Carmel School\u2019s athletic director.<\/p>\n

SARC, in their report, has recommended to the BOE to appoint more members coming from the Attorney General\u2019s Office, the Department of Justice, and Public School System counselors to help them with the task.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we all know, with volunteers, there going to be those individuals that are not going to be able to make it to every meeting. That\u2019s fine, but we have a huge task. We have a lot of work out there and I believe that we\u2019re falling short on the things that we need to do,\u201d said Blanco.<\/p>\n

He added that failing to do their task would mean more students would continue to fall behind or fail with their classes. \u201cAnd we don\u2019t want that to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

BOE member Marylou S. Ada suggested to Blanco that SARC should collaborate with the Community Guidance Center and see what assistance they could give.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is one thing that we probably need, as well as having a dedicated member within the Public School System to help us out with that. Since [SARC] is a volunteer organization, most of us when we\u2019re done with the meeting, we\u2019re really done and we\u2019re going to do our regular things,\u201d said Blanco.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do need to reach out to these organizations [like the CGC]. But we\u2019re still young and we just started in January 2014. There are a lot of things that need to be addressed that\u2019s why we also need the help from others so we could make things successful,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

BOE chair Herman T. Guerrero said they are working with Education Commissioner Dr. Rita A. Sablan to see how they could add more members to the committee headed by Blanco. \u201cI know SARC has requested they need a full-time staff and we\u2019re working with the commissioner on that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn terms of adding more members to SARC, I want to make sure the committee would work because it would involve other government officials from other agencies to be members of this committee,\u201d said Guerrero, who added that SARC has been meeting regularly.<\/p>\n

\u201c[SARC] is relatively new and we have to make sure there\u2019s no impediment in appointing additional members to cover areas and other concerns of the committee. We\u2019re going to study the report and look into it and we\u2019ll get back to you,\u201d Guerrero told Blanco.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Student Attendance Review Committee chair John Blanco is hoping that the CNMI State Board of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":232638,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[39,1738,41,2890],"class_list":["post-232619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-boe","tag-john-blanco","tag-public-school-system","tag-sarc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}