The Guam Legislature should abandon any thought about returning the Department of Education to the control of the governor; not because Lou Leon Guerrero wouldn’t do a good job, but because Josh Tenorio’s political ambitions would siphon the life out of GovGuam’s single most important agency.
This past Monday on the talk show Mornings With Patti, Guam Education Board chairman Angel Sablan repeated a call he has made since first being elected to the board. “Maybe it’s time to return the Department of Education to the governor,” he told host and longtime journalist Patti Arroyo. The comment followed their conversation about the problems the government’s largest agency is facing amid the announcement by GDOE superintendent Erik Swanson that he is resigning from his post at the end of this year.
No doubt, GDOE is a vortex of problems. The yet-to-be-publicly-unpackaged financial maelstrom that obviously debilitates operations and effective management. The perennial underfunding by senators. The tyranny of GovGuam’s one-size-fits-all procurement system on this agency of diverse management needs. The aged-beyond-repair facilities and the facilities needing repair and without resources. The problems finding teachers, support staff, supplies, and equipment to meet the most basic resource levels your kids should have.
And all of those problems are before the biggest concerns of all: Are students learning to standard? Are they graduating prepared for the future? Are they graduating? Are we bridging them from classrooms to careers? Are they becoming good citizens? Are we valuing their teachers the way we should be valuing them: as professionals of the highest order in this island?
Perhaps, as Mr. Sablan repeatedly has suggested, the governor of Guam is in the best position to manage and marshal the resources of the government to prioritize GDOE as it should be, so long as she or he is able to convince senators to prioritize funding to the agency annually. And perhaps Lou Leon Guerrero, who has demonstrated ability to manage the executive branch through a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, is the best suited governor to get this done.
But there’s a glaring problem that stands ready to eat up any positive gubernatorial effort if GDOE were returned to Adelup’s control: the lieutenant governor.
Joshua Tenorio announced last year that he’s running for governor next year. He’s held multiple fundraisers where scores of GovGuam employees reportedly have been all but coerced to donate and to attend. For the past six years his political machine – the same machine that is running his campaign – has been responsible for the placement of family, friends, and supporters into government jobs everywhere from the Department of Military Affairs to the Port Authority of Guam to the A.B. Won Pat International Airport Authority to the Department of Labor, and everywhere in between. Want a glimpse into the financial and hiring abuses that would persist in a Tenorio administration? Just take a look at what Mr. Tenorio’s camp did and attempted to do at the seaport above the objections of the governor’s appointed general manager there.
And Mr. Sablan wants to place the financials and the hiring power of the government’s largest and most funded agency within the vicinity of Lieutenant Governor Joshua Tenorio? One year before the gubernatorial election?
The legislature would be incredibly stupid to even entertain such a thought.
Senator Chris Barnett previously warned against an effort last year to temporarily give the governor control of GDOE. On the floor of the legislature he said that Adelup would bloat the agency with political hires right before the election next year, then hand the agency back to the board with insufficient funding and without a care in the world.
GDOE has its problems, yes. We can start to fix those problems with legislative commitment to properly funding the agency and tremendously increasing teacher salaries, and by our commitment as voters to elect good people to the Guam Education Board. Truthfully, the ones there now mostly are fine. What they need is legislative support to gut that place of the bureaucrats who have been impediments to progress, and the resources to make public education what your kids deserve.
We believe Mr. Barnett is right. We believe – and there’s six years of Mr. Tenorio’s actions to back this up – that placing the power over GovGuam’s single-largest agency in the governor’s hands would simply allow the lieutenant governor to jump into the fray like a kid in a candy store.
Once the election is over, the only thing left will be licorice sticks.
