NEW Guam Department of Education Superintendent Jon Fernandez ventured out of the GDOE offices on his first day on the job and visited the northern campuses of Simon Sanchez High School and F.B. Leon Guerrero Middle School to speak with students and teachers.
“Our primary mission is to educate our children, so I wanted to start by hearing from our children first,” Fernandez said. “It is their interests that should guide our work on a day-to-day basis.”
During the next few weeks, the new superintendent intends to visit all of the 40 schools under the Guam Public School system to hear out the needs and challenges of the school community.
While at the SSHS campus, Fernandez toured the gym that was recently repainted and refurbished with new fixtures through the efforts of the students. He said the “social activism” exhibited by the students and promoted by the school should be replicated.
“I am proud of the students for showing us adults that for all that we are doing to talk about resources, to talk about our commitment to education, to talk about what we care about in terms of the public school system, they are actually getting out and raising the resources and doing it themselves,” he said.
He added: “There are instances when you see excellence in the schools. How do we replicate that across our school system? Those are the things that you definitely want to do – whether it is innovative teaching or parental engagement.”
However, Fernandez emphasized that this also brings into focus the fact that these students are dealing with GDOE responsibilities.
“These are students doing adults’ jobs. And if that’s the case, I need to figure out where our resources are going, how we are dealing with our responsibilities,” he explained.
“When I go back to my office, when I go back and talk to some of our elected officials, I can always point to the fact that you’ve got students out here who are ignoring all of the things that we are doing so they can fix their own facilities and have a school that they are happy to be in and have a learning environment where they can succeed, while we are sitting here and we can’t figure those issues out. I am not very happy that they had to do it.”
GDOE woes
Fernandez acknowledges the fact that the department has been besieged by fiscal and operational challenges but said the “focus of all efforts should remain on the classroom and on teaching and learning in order to succeed at the mission of educating children to succeed.”
According to Fernandez, the department will be hiring former interim Superintendent Taling Taitano as a deputy for operations and finance. Taitano, he said, will help sort out the financial and operational issues of the department.
“We have been working on these issues and we’ve been making progress, but there’s a lot of work to do. I feel very confident that Taling will be focused and will dedicate her efforts on improving operations and finances,” he said.
