HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — Less than half of the students served by the Guam Department of Education will be able to attend in-class instruction by the start of the academic year on Aug. 23, according to GDOE Superintendent Kenneth Swanson.
Public school officials are engaged with the daunting task of working to have schools recover from the damage caused by Typhoon Mawar and in line with the recent mandate in Public Law 37-4 to comply with sanitation regulations – or shut down.
The Guam Daily Post reported Monday that just three of the 41 public schools so far have cleared that bar.
“The logistics are significant,” Swanson told lawmakers Tuesday during an emergency session of the Legislature.
“As I look at it, we – after four weeks or the time that we have left or left before the scheduled opening of school – we can get to 42% of capacity.”
Lawmakers are weighing several pieces of legislation meant to help GDOE get off the ground by Aug. 23, including Bill 156-37, which would give schools more leeway on sanitation violations they are working to mitigate, among other things.
The start of the school year has already been delayed by several weeks, and though a further extension may help GDOE build more capacity, Swanson said, “it would create a chain of events that we just don’t want to have to deal with, not only for our organization, but in the community as well.”
Seeking latitude
GDOE’s current situation with sanitation regulations, “when you do the math, it’s impossible,” Swanson said.
He said GDOE needs a number of things before it has the capacity to serve 30,000 students every day. The first step is to get staff back on campus.
School officials Monday said teachers are allowed back onto mold- and hazard-ridden campuses by the Department of Public Health and Social Services, but only for the purposes of dealing with sanitation inspection preparedness. Swanson said teachers and administrators have a number of other things they need to handle before the school year starts, including professional development.
He asked lawmakers for more authority to determine which schools are safe for kids.
That task is now largely left to the health inspectors at Public Health.
“I need the latitude to make a decision about (the question), ‘Is this building safe for kids?’ Because at the end of the day, I’m the guy that gets the bullet out there. Not the principals, me. So I’m not going to put any child or any one of my staff in a dangerous situation,” he said, adding that he had enough experience to be able to make that determination.
Plans for double sessions, though not ideal, will help GDOE meet the goal of opening, Swanson said. A number of campuses that are not fully ready to be reopened may have to be sectioned off and have double sessions held within one campus.
That includes some of the schools in the worst shape after Typhoon Mawar, according to Joe Sanchez, deputy superintendent of curriculum and instruction.
Some 12 schools are “Tier 3,” meaning they can’t be fixed without hiring contractors to shore them up over the course of six or eight months, Sanchez said. Issues with restrooms and sewage problems are the main cause.
Six of those campuses can open on a limited basis, however, if parts of the school are cordoned off and shut down for repairs.
‘They need to be learning’
Meanwhile, some senators are expressing more sympathy for the idea of rolling back parts of Public Law 37-4, which requires schools to comply with sanitation guidelines by this summer, instead of the original deadline of June 30, 2024. Senators passed the measure unanimously early this year, but school officials and the Leon Guerrero-Tenorio administration have been asking for months that it be backpedaled.
Sen. Joe San Agustin said he planned to amend Bill 156 to exempt lease-back campuses, including John F. Kennedy High School, from the requirement when the government of Guam is still paying contractors millions of dollars a year to keep schools in shape.
“Because, No. 1, we’re still paying them. We put it in the budget to pay to maintain the lease so that schools are maintained,” San Agustin said.
“The schools were built to the standard, … all they have to do is maintain it. When you change (the) rules, you couldn’t change the lease.”
Sen. Tom Fisher went further, bringing up the idea of allowing all schools to open, provided they were safe, noting that they were operating just before the summer break.
“That was happening just three months ago. Can’t we do it again and chew gum at the same time? Clean the schools?” Fisher asked Swanson.
“Yes, of course we can,” the superintendent replied.
Fisher said the real emergency kids are facing is a lack of instruction time.
“It is not an emergency if, you know, one of the walls is dripping,” he said. “That’s unfortunate. It is repairable. It is not an emergency. If one school has a rat, that’s unfortunate, but we can take care of the rat. In the meantime, those kids need to be in those chairs, and they need to be learning.”
Members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers continue debris removal efforts Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2023.
