How will the Guam Department of Education address some much-needed repairs? Hopefully, with the assistance of over $200 million dollars in federal funding.

Guam Education Board Chair Mark Mendiola gave the breakdown on how the Department plans on using the $287 million from the American Rescue Plan to address facility issues and ensure that the system is up to standard.

"We've already started fixing a lot of our facilities," he said. "There was a thing called deferred maintenance costs that was done by the Army Corps of Engineers a couple years back and they basically said it's going to take about over $100 million to kind of put the schools bring them up to a certain standard a certain level So obviously with the amount of money that has been coming in from Uncle Sam you know we're able to help do a lot of these repairs, but it has to be attached to safely reopening schools."

Mendiola added that with the new, modern perspective on education, GDOE also looks to place a heavy emphasis on STEM education.

"They're putting in some serious resources to ensuring that the infrastructure for technology is going to be upgrading for many years to come," he said.

As well as institute a pre-k program and redo all the textbooks so that they're up to standard.

The board will meet towards the end of the month to look at cutting back approximately $40 to 60 million for the upcoming fiscal year budget.

The board submitted its budget back in January with the 14 points of the Adequate Public Education Act in mind which totaled to about $300 million. He details a recent meeting with budget chair Sen. Joe San Agustin who is looking at reducing the local education budget due to large amounts of federal funding coming in.

"We basically met with him and said hey you know give us a little bit of time because there's guidance that's coming in from Uncle Sam right U.S. Ed," Mendiola said. "And what can we use these dollars for that we can back out from some of the areas that we put in our budget and so we were able to do that and you know we were able to do some facility issues."

Congress put in the maintenance of effort requirement with the intent to work in partnership the local system, and the federal funds are not to be used to replace the local budget. Mendiola said he's confident in the leadership of the Department of Education that they will maximize the resources that Uncle Sam is providing.