Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands

Choose a State

No Program

Although the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) does not provide state-funded preschool as defined in this report, the territory does support early education in other ways. Since 1984, the CNMI Public School System has operated the Head Start program in ten centers across multiple islands, providing two center-based program options: double session (half-day) and fullday. During the 2017-2018 school year, there were 192 enrollment slots allocated to the half-day variation that offered services four days per week, 152 days per year, in both the morning and the afternoon. The remaining 204 slots operated a standard full-day with 6.5 hours of planned class operations, five days a week, 160 days per year. The CNMI Head Start program had 396 preschool-aged Head Start slots in 2021-2022 and provided specialized services for young children with special needs.

In December 2019, the CNMI was awarded $2,125,989 under the Preschool Development Grant Birth through Five competition to support development, planning, and coordination of the territory’s early learning system. The Department of Community and Cultural Affairs (DCCA) was named as the lead agency overseeing this award to coordinate and collaborate efforts across early childhood programs.

Since February 2015, the CNMI continues to be the lone grantee in the Outer Pacific to be awarded the Early Head Start- Child Care Partnership Grant. The program operates for eight hours a day, five days a week for the full calendar year (222 instructional days). In 2017-2018, the program served a total of 64 infants and toddlers, ages six weeks to three years old. Forty-eight of the enrolled slots are in grantee-operated classrooms, and the remaining 16 slots are allocated as partnership slots. The Northern Marianas International School is the lone partnership site that has two classrooms serving Early Head Start enrolled children.

CNMI has early learning guidelines for children birth through age five which address multiple domains, including logic and reasoning, social studies, physical development and health, language development, literacy, mathematics, science, English language development, social and emotional development, approaches to learning, and creative arts expression. The guidelines are aligned with the Head Start Child Development and Learning Framework.

CNMI is piloting a quality rating and improvement system (QRIS), providing reviews, ratings, coaching and technical assistance to eight local care providers. Program quality assessment tools are already used for quality assurance and monitoring and are now incorporated as one component of the QRIS.