Guam - Although the island's schoolchildren are out of classes for the summer, work continues to prepare schools for the upcoming school year and to welcome a new superintendent next month. For the last year, Taling Taitano has been running the Department of Education in an interim capacity, filling the vacancy left by Dr. Nerissa Underwood, who retired last July. 

Taitano was initially hired as the deputy superintendent of finance and administrative services and even during her time as the interim superintendent, she's placed much of her energy on getting the department off high-risk grantee status. "We completed the comprehensive corrective action plan which is a roadmap to get off high-risk and part of that was the implementation of the financial management information system. So we were able to get that partially up in April and we're going to finish implementation in July. It's looking good so far," she said.

Taitano says with continued hard work, she anticipates that the department could clear within the next couple of years. The department had to hire a third-party fiduciary agent to assist it with managing millions of dollars as the feds were concerned that the department wasn't complying with federal reporting requirements and managing federal funds properly.

Taitano says the lack of financial resources has proven challenging but the department has forged ahead despite the lack of resources.