What’s going on at the Home of the Sharks? The Legislative Committee on Education toured the Yigo campus this week, finding rodents, mold, and other issues. Public school officials are being given the year to fix the longstanding problems before health inspectors get back to enforcing health and safety requirements.

2024 could be a repeat of what the island saw a decade-and-a-half ago when a health and safety task led by the former attorney general and an education suruhanu was shutting down campuses. The closures were a result of multiple health violations.

Similar issues seen just this week at Simon Sanchez High School - here are images of a snake, rats in a trap, mold, broken ceiling tiles, busted doors and more. Tom Nadeau is chief environmental public health officer who was made aware of the problems discovered this past tuesday.

"Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like much improvement has been made and what improvements there are was probably short lived. So, obviously GDOE’s challenged. But I won’t speak for them accept that they are able to meet the requirement of our regulations governing school sanitations. It’s disappointing but I am not really surprised," said Nadeau.

Education committee chair Senator Chris Barnett and Senator Sabina Perez were at the northern Guam school, seeing it all first hand. "A lot of the students and staff at Sanchez just feel forgotten and the conditions here at this school is absolutely unacceptable," said Barnett.

The freshman policymaker added, "The last time this school was inspected by Public Health was in 2016. They got a sanitary permit that’s current which kind of boggles my mind."

Senator Perez also said, "If they had come, they’d probably see all the potential violations that are happening and we were a witness to. I think it’s a real sanitation issue if we are finding rats in schools. Even if it’s a couple rats that means there is potentially a larger problem."

The senators will discuss their findings with GDOE and Public Health. "It's important that this gets addressed immediately," Perez noted.

Nadeau added, "There have actually been some inspections after January 2016. In fact, there were a handful but that was during the period when the division was working with GDOE on their pilot project."

While a manpower shortage for health inspectors remains an issue, Nadeau says they did pick up six new inspectors who are now in training. Health officials also offering training with the public school system to help them become compliant.

Remilisa Oriando, environmental public health officer supervisor at Public Health, said, "It’s really going to be a challenge to get these school buildings into compliance, especially with the current school building regulations."

For now, the agency is giving GDOE schools a heads up, with Nadeau saying, "We are focusing on education at this time, but they are aware come 2024 we will be starting to enforce the required of our regulations governing school sanitation."

The oversight chair on education shared his concern with acting GDOE superintendent Dr. Judi Won Pat. Public Health is scheduled to inspect the Yigo campus on Tuesday.