IN DEPTH: Sorting through the latest public school crisis, and the rhetoric of leaders blaming each other

The government of Guam’s elected officials spent Friday in a battle for political control of its largest agency – the Guam Department of Education – but are no where closer than they were yesterday to figuring out when nearly half of schools will open, which schools will operate on a modified schedule, and when repairs to at least 10 dilapidated schools will be complete.

This is not to mention the lack of information on a bus schedule, bell schedule, or what happens to students who rely on two of each weekday’s ideally three meals from the free breakfast and lunch program GDOE provides when schools are open.

As of Wednesday, GDOE announced the opening of schools was pushed back from August 8 to August 15. That decision, however, reportedly is fluid after the GDOE superintendent Eric Swanson’s announcement before senators Wednesday that he is looking to push the start date back to August 23. He said a decision will be made and announced Friday. No such announcement has been made.

Instead, GDOE on Friday confirmed the opening of 23 public schools, with one sentence in its news release on the matter stating, “We will update the community early next week on the results of schools pending DPHSS sanitation inspection.”

Just two weeks ago, public school parents, students, teachers, and staff were planning the return of students to school on August 8 without any indication from GDOE officials that half the schools had yet to pass public health inspections for health, safety, and sanitation. Then, the legislature began discussing a bill Dwayne San Nicolas introduced in mid-June that would have allowed the superintendent of education – Erik Swanson – to decide which schools should open even if they did not pass public health inspection.

That was when the chaos started and when the public first began to find out there may be a problem opening the schools as scheduled on August 8.

What has ensued throughout the government since has been nothing short of confusing, and certainly has not helped in any meaningful way to get the remaining 18 schools safe and sanitary for kids.

A political crisis has been exacerbated by books that could be written chronicling the rhetoric of the past two weeks by the Guam Education Board, senators, the governor, and Adelup. In order to understand the current crisis, it is important to understand the facts surrounding GDOE’s historic inability to provide safe and sanitary campuses.

This didn’t happen overnight

The dilapidated state of most of the public schools did not happen overnight or even over the past year. The current state is the result of decades of deferred maintenance compounded by legislatures and governors year after year failing to budget the millions needed each year for GDOE to repair schools.

For decades, politicians were able to rely on the excuse that the government lacked funding to repair the schools, albeit amid the substantial growth in annual revenues due to tax increases and other factors and its prioritization of those additional funds to pay raises, hiring, and priorities other than school facilities. That excuse ended in 2021 and 2022, when then-Congressman Michael San Nicolas secured two major sources of federal pandemic funding that in total provided far more than the 2011 estimate by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was needed to fix deferred maintenance issues in the schools.

Not long after Jon Fernandez left GDOE as its superintendent in mid-July 2022, the public found out that most of the federal funds had not been obligated and GDOE was in danger of losing more than $100 million to deadlines for obligation and spending of that money.

Francis Santos then Judith Won Pat (now the governor’s education liaison and also a former senator who for years had oversight of GDOE) stepped in as interim heads of the agency and began to move obligations forward through a spending plan for school repairs. On December 29, 2022, the board selected Mr. Swanson to be the new superintendent, and early the next year he took over the role from Ms. Won Pat.

In January of 2023, Chris Barnett was elected by his colleagues to be the chairman of the legislative education committee, giving him oversight of GDOE. Following an in-person assessment of the schools and indictments of Department of Public Health and Social Services officials for certifying the opening of unsafe schools that had failed or never received sanitary inspections, Mr. Barnett introduced legislation to stop the practice. The bill, which became law above the governor’s objections, made it clear that GDOE could not open any school that had yet to pass a current sanitary inspection by public health.

During that time, and as schools struggled to figure out how to stay open and move forward, Lieutenant Governor Joshua Tenorio said, “The Department of Education’s long-standing issues with maintaining facilities require a whole-of-government approach where all partners are addressing the various needs of our schools. Bringing all our subject matter experts, mobilizing their resources, and committing to long-term solutions is just the start. Our administration has already initiated an agreement with GPA to better support GDOE’s pressing electrical needs, and we hope to create similar solutions to provide for sustainable maintenance islandwide.”

The Barnett statute has governed GDOE’s school readiness effort, or at least it should have. Even if school officials and board members hoped for Mr. San Nicolas’ June bill repealing the Barnett statute to become law, the school system should have operated under assumptions based on the current law. Responsibility requires that GDOE should have warned the public closer to the beginning of the summer break that it was possible that nearly half of the schools would not be ready for the scheduled August 8 opening.

But the public wasn’t made aware of the crisis until senators called in GDOE officials during the debate over the San Nicolas bill, and Mr. Swanson explained just how many schools were yet to be inspected or even prepared for inspection.

Fact checking the claims made by all sides of this crisis

No side in this crisis is being completely honest or forthcoming about the problems facing public schools, much less the solutions that have yet to be laid out for the public to know.

GDOE’s efforts have been played up, cast down, or altogether ignored by several elected officials, with speculation about one of its officials being tied to the lieutenant governor’s candidacy for governor. Mr. Tenorio is the only elected official to announce his candidacy for governor.

Speaker Therese Terlaje and Mr. Barnett have both applauded GDOE for doing what it has not been able to do in decades: Get 23 public school campuses up to code. But in arguing against a tangent effort by the governor to take over public schools (the part of the crisis that consumed Adelup and the legislature Friday), both senators appeared reluctant to acknowledge the remaining part of the truth in this matter: GDOE also failed so far to get another 18 schools up to legal standard.

GDOE’s communication with parents and students about this fiasco has been an abysmal failure throughout this crisis with more questions lingering than there have been answered.

And despite the lack of fundamental information, the education board, the legislature, and the governor engaged in political matters connected to the crisis, but not providing any solutions to it directly.

The board last week voted to declare a state of emergency, a show to the public that it was providing solutions to the problem.

FACT CHECK: A state of emergency simply allows the superintendent to expend no more than $250,000 using faster procurement protocols. Also, the board did not need to declare the emergency. Guam law already allows the superintendent to make such a declaration.

During the second debate on Dwayne San Nicolas’ bill to reverse the Barnett sanitation statute, Mr. Barnett moved for an amendment that would increase the emergency state threshold from $250,000 to $1 million for GDOE. The amendment was made within the context of providing GDOE the flexibility to make repairs faster at the remaining 18 campuses that had yet to be inspected.

FACT CHECK: The repairs needed to at least 10 of those 18 campuses are estimated to cost far more than $1 million.

In advocating for a government-wide effort to repair schools using existing resources, Mr. Barnett has said that Mr. Tenorio failed to keep his February 2023 promise to mobilize executive branch resources. This was the salvo that began a back-and-forth blame game between the senator and Governor Leon Guerrero.

FACT CHECK: Mr. Tenorio did make good on his promise to coordinate an agreement between GDOE and Guam Power Authority for electrical professionals to work on a limited-scope repair of school facilities. While it is true that no ‘whole of government’ effort has been made during the Leon Guerrero administration to get schools ready during the summer through adopt-a-school programs previous administrations had undertaken, it is untrue that the administration did not at least attempt to help GDOE. “As of today, we continue to wait for GDOE to provide a scope of work for necessary repairs (which the administration, through Education liaison and former Speaker Judi Won Pat, has requested for weeks),” governor’s spokeswoman Krystal Paco-San Agustin confirmed. “GDOE will also need to procure materials to be used in the repairs, which could have and should have been procured long before the scheduled opening of schools. Unfortunately, the Governor does not have control over GDOE’s procurement.” Also, the governor’s office coordinated for GPA and Department of Public Works to help GDOE to develop the necessary scopes of work for the repair projects, “which GDOE has never actually put out for bid,” Ms. Paco-San Agustin confirmed.

Adelup’s contention that the governor was being blamed for a crisis she has no control over is what led the governor to introduce legislation Thursday and throw the senators into session Friday to resolve. The bill, which ended up failing in a 3-11 vote (Amanda Shelton was absent), would have given the governor complete control  over GDOE and its annual hundreds of millions in funds through the end of her term.

During the debate on that bill, Will Parkinson said Ms. Leon Guerrero is the only elected official asking for the responsibility over GDOE, and dismissed fears expressed by other senators that an official asking for the opportunity to be blamed for GDOE problems would corrupt the agency politically.

FACT CHECK: The last time the governor of Guam had the authority to appoint the board of education, the agency was packed with political hires, the military pulled its members’ children out of GDOE and started DODEA here, and GDOE’s federal grants were placed on high-risk grantee status. And while Mr. Parkinson and the governor’s office are correct that the governor does not have control over GDOE, nothing prevents her from helping and detailing resources to the agency, as previous governors have done.

After the governor’s bill was overwhelmingly defeated, she ratcheted up her attacks on Mr. Barnett, blaming him almost entirely for the crisis.

“Chris Barnett, as education chair, has held monthly oversight hearings on GDOE for over a year,” the governor said in a post-defeat statement. “If there was one person who should have seen the delayed school year coming it is Chris Barnett–yet he did nothing to prevent it. He has failed as the education oversight chair, but he has excelled at calling out problems, blaming everyone but himself for the failure of our schools, while proposing no solutions. Unfortunately, for our school kids, his ineptitude at his job will keep many of them out of their classrooms.”

FACT CHECK: Mr. Barnett, while part of the very government that quite candidly has failed public school students and stakeholders, did in fact help as a senator to move along the safety and sanitation upgrades of 23 schools now ready for opening, and as a volunteer who went into many schools with his staff to physically assist readiness efforts. Kandit will be publishing a story revealing which elected and appointed officials have actually assisted public schools over the past year and a half.

None of the blame and none of the solutions proffered by senators and Adelup got us anywhere closer to the opening of all schools.

Reactions from readers:

In the end, neither the Dwayne San Nicolas bill, the education board state of emergency, the Chris Barnett $1M procurement amendment, nor the governor’s power grab bill would have done anything meaningful to get the 18 remaining schools ready for opening this coming Thursday.

Public commentary on the school readiness matter is not blind to this reality.

“It’s nice seeing everyone cooperating and working so hard to address the problem,” Carlos Pangelinan wrote mockingly in response to a Pacific Daily News story on senators rejecting the governor’s move to take over GDOE. For disclosure, Mr. Pangelinan is one of the three owners of Kandit, though he has never participated in Kandit’s operations.

“They should stop debating and go out to the schools themselves and look what the staff have to work with!” FannieMarie Cruz McKee wrote. “Some bring their personal tools to work with and some buy things to get the job going. So stop thinking and come out Senators and see the schools for yourself. Debate debate not gonna help anyone.”

‘[W]hy did they wait ’til the start of school to start addressing these issues that were known to them since apparently last year?” Keisha Marie asked.

“Let’s not forget how this all started, Darrel made a big show, cried on YouTube, and still doesn’t offer any solutions,” wrote a person on Facebook (with the profile name Tattle Tell), referring to Chris Barnett, whose first name is Darrel. “You elected him because he’s funny! Are you laughing now?”

“So why all this drama, sounds like someone is seeking attention,” James Anderson wrote in response to Mr. Barnett’s Friday video message on the governor’s bill.

“‘Temporary control’ or not over GDOE, you still have the power to assist GDOE with the repairs it needs, you just don’t have the heart to do so,” Lori Quichocho wrote, criticizing the governor.