Just when we thought the Guam Public School System has resolved its issues related to textbooks, a recent internal audit reveals that for last year the agency - the largest in the cash-strapped local government - ordered textbooks for Catholic schools.  But evidently, none were ordered for public schools.

"We ordered textbooks for Catholic schools, but no textbooks for public schools." - Lester Kuykendall, GPSS chief auditor

"The findings were disappointing, but at this point because we now know what are the specific areas we need to improve on then we can tighten up and improve those areas," said GPSS superintendent Dr. Nerissa Bretania-Shafer.  She noted such after an internal audit was conducted on the total textbook appropriations, expropriations and expenditures of the learning materials dating back to 2003.

GPSS chief auditor Lester Kuykendall revealed the biggest finding, telling KUAM News, "The question was whether we ordered textbooks in the last two years. Well the answer was yes and no - we ordered textbooks for Catholic schools, but no textbooks for public schools."  At the time, Kuykendall says GPSS had enough money to buy textbooks for private schools, but not for the entire school system.

Another significant discovery was that between 2003 and 2008, GPSS received an appropriation of $18 million, but it's unclear whether they used those funds specifically for textbooks.  "Even though $18 million was appropriated, we were not able to procure sufficient textbooks for that amount of money available due to inadequate bookkeeping," he continued.  "We didn't know if we had sufficient funds or not."

It's because of this that GPSS was first placed on high-risk status by the feds back in 2003.  Kuykendall recommends that GPSS first reconcile financial accounts and to stabilize the hiring of new comptrollers. In order to rectify the problem, the superintendent has implemented a Managers Internal Control Program, which will hold officials at GPSS accountable.

Meanwhile, Speaker Judi WonPat (D) says she's concerned about these findings mainly because every year GPSS is given an advance appropriation of $3.5 million. It was just recently when the leader of the 29th Legislature found out that textbooks haven't been ordered, as she recalled, "Only to find out this summer when Dr. Shafer came on board that the textbooks were never ordered.  But worse yet is that because they made the decision to remove the second reading block for [Direct Instruction] that means they need to go in and reorder all the textbooks basically for the entire school system and there really wasn't enough time to plan and order."

Won Pat says she plans to hold an oversight hearing on textbooks. This would be the fourth hearing scheduled to discuss this same issue.