There is good reason many people – parents, teachers and other community members – are cautious about using generative AI in classrooms. That’s largely because our overall use of AI is an experiment and we don’t know what the long-term outcome for society and learning will be.

We do know that AI makes it easier for students to cheat and shortcut their way through school, even when schools and teachers put restrictions on its use. There are other questions, including: How do we know which AI content to trust? Will AI diminish or destroy the human element in music, art, videos and other creative fields? Will AI make future generations dumber?

‘Iolani School’s Gabriel Yanagihara says the biggest issue about AI in schools is the lack of clarity about when or even whether students can use AI tools in individual classes. The Hawai‘i DOE has general guidelines about ethical and transparent use of appropriate AI tools, as well as data privacy. Its Digital Design Team outlines these guidelines for teachers and students on its website; go to tinyurl.com/HIDOEai.

“Teachers aren’t sure what’s safe, what’s allowed, or what tools are worth their time,” he says. “They are worked so much already, so even though AI can help lower their workloads and help with work-life balance, it’s a big ask to ask them to learn a whole new system on top of all we already ask of our educators.”

Yanagihara helps with ‘Iolani’s AI strategy and teacher support. “We were able to move quickly because we had the flexibility to build an internal task force, test tools and implement support systems in-house.”

However, schools vary greatly in resources, he says. Some schools lack devices or reliable internet access, which makes hands-on training harder. Others worry about ethics or student misuse, and lack of understanding by teachers and parents.

Ethical and appropriate AI use

Brian Grantham of Mid-Pacific Institute is working with teachers and departments on appropriate AI tools in each subject area. The goal is to use AI for deeper learning, not just copy and paste and turn the assignment in.

Teachers’ knowledge of AI is limited, and they are concerned about students cheating. His response is to have students and teachers work together, “co-creating classroom expectations.”

When kids are invited into the AI discussion, they see ways to use AI tools from their perspective and how each individual learns, Grantham says.

Teachers can create assignments that make sense to themselves, but students might see them differently, particularly if they have a learning difference such as ADHD, he says. That means the teacher’s instructions for the assignment can seem overwhelming or ambiguous.

Mid-Pacific’s syllabi include clear guidelines on use of AI, including when students must ask permission to use it. Last year teachers had varying policies about AI use, which confused students. So, this year AI policies are consistent within each subject.

Mid-Pacific high school students can directly use ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot, Adobe and Apple Intelligence. Elementary and middle school students can use the SchoolAI platform.

Mid-Pacific also has an AI Certification Course that prepares students for the workplace of the future, providing them with skills that are in high demand across industries, Grantham says.

AI literacy training and ethical standards

High schools and colleges are concerned that AI use without clear guardrails to keep students safe is rampant.

AI’s effects are “terrible,” says an English teacher from Farrington High School. She says she’s returning to pencil and paper assignments so she can better assess her students’ writing. In fact, many English teachers agree on the importance of having students do more in-class writing without access to the internet.

Both independent and public schools in Hawai‘i are addressing issues of ethical AI use through AI literacy training and by having guardrails on AI tools used at school. The idea is to encourage AI use in ways that enhance critical thinking while keeping student information safe.

That training on the ethical use of AI is crucial because schools cannot monitor and protect students when they use AI and social media at home.

AI detectors don’t work

Educators interviewed for this story unanimously said that AI detection tools don’t work effectively and can be wrong. A teacher might end up punishing a student when a teacher’s guidelines for AI use aren’t clear. Teachers who get to know their students can recognize when a student has turned in work using AI without being transparent about it and not labeling how they used the tool – but if you have dozens of new students each semester, knowing each of them well can be a challenge.

Mid-Pacific Institute has done a lot of testing with AI detectors and found they hallucinate worse than AI itself does. Plus the detector provides the percentage of content that might have been generated by AI, which can be misleading.

“How do you take a 70% accusation and then leverage that against a kid when you may or may not be right?” Grantham says. Because once you accuse a student of cheating, the student might get suspended or expelled, and that will hurt their future.

He suggests that early in the semester, teachers assign several writing pieces on paper in class, “so you can start to capture how your kids speak.”

When the teachers see the student’s work later, the teacher will know whether the writing is too clean or above the student’s level.

Left: Mike Latham of Punahou, Center: Mike Sarmiento of Purple Maia, Right: Michael Ida of Kalani High School

AI ethics and trust

In 2021, Hawai‘i’s Legislature passed Act 158 to improve digital literacy among young people. It required all K-12 public schools to offer computer science courses or computer science content by the 2024-2025 school year. And, according to the state Department of Education’s Miki Cacace, AI will be integrated into updated computer science standards next summer. (See guidelines on computer science education from a national consortium at reimaginingcs.org.)

“The mandate from Act 158 provides crucial support needed for expanding professional development,” Cacace says.

This legislation has driven a significant increase in the number of computer science instructors, growing from 1,237 in 2022-2023 to 3,815 in 2024-2025, she says. The DOE has created AI guidance and training through its Office of Curriculum and Instructional Design. In fact, DOE administrators are ahead of many school districts in the U.S. They’ve drawn up guidelines for ethical use of AI in their schools (tinyurl.com/Hawaiiai), encouraged computer science and AI literacy training, and are developing approaches for holding students accountable for ethical use of AI. Find the DOE’s AI guidance for teachers and resources at tinyurl.com/Hawaiiai2, and guidelines for students at bit.ly/hidoe-ai-students.

Public school teachers who want to learn more about computer science/AI learning opportunities can email cs@k12.hi.us. The Magic School AI pilot is only available for HIDOE K-12 public schools.

The challenge faced by the DOE in increasing AI literacy training and education lies in the size and complexity of the public school system. Reaching about 152,000 students and 13,000 teachers, librarians and counselors takes time and patience. However, there are schools with pockets of early AI adopter teachers who are motivated to experiment and lead others.

Winston Sakurai, executive assistant and chief of staff at the DOE’s Office of Curriculum and Instructional Design, says schools should complete a self-assessment and build AI literacy by identifying key personnel, finding areas for growth, and setting a vision for how they want to use AI while meeting DOE goals for graduation.

Each school will approach this differently, just as they do with curriculum and instruction, because communities have unique needs. The overall goal is the same: to use AI responsibly and effectively while also legally protecting students’ private data and information that they provide to an AI tool or chatbot. Such protections are required by federal laws such as COPPA, or the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

Safeguarding student data

Some of Hawai‘i’s private schools have moved quickly with teacher training on AI, including syllabi with ethical standards and guidelines on when to use AI tools.

Mid-Pacific’s Grantham says educators use AI tools at school that have guardrails to protect student data. Mid-Pacific’s elementary school uses SchoolAI, a “wrapper” program that adds guardrails around other AI programs to protect student data. It limits AI responses to those appropriate for the child’s age.

Just as with Magic School AI, students do not have their own SchoolAI accounts. They piggyback on the teacher’s account, letting the teacher set the boundaries.

Grantham says the process of doing an assignment can be more important than the final product. Some teachers focus on individual steps rather than the final exam, paper or project. That makes cheating less likely too because a final paper can often be generated by AI.

“It’s about, ‘What did you do to get to that product and the thinking?’” Grantham says.

Yanagihara of ‘Iolani calls this process “scaffolding,” or “steps” in the learning process.

Michael Ida’s students in computer science and math at Kalani High School collaborate on whiteboards on stands in the classroom and also use Chromebooks at school that have internet access for AI use. Ida says AI won’t replace teachers but is a valuable tool to save teachers time on tasks like generating sets of problems with unique answers, which takes hours to create manually.

“If I try to be creative, maybe I can use it to supercharge my teaching in a way that I wasn’t able to do before,” Ida says.

You can’t “unring the bell”

Punahou School’s approach is focused on AI “as a kind of critical literacy,” according to Punahou President Michael Latham. “We want our students to have a clear understanding of how the technology works, of actually what’s involved in the technology,” he says.

“We want them to be aware of and able to use it in ways that provide them with advantages, especially in personalized learning. But we also want them to be aware of the pitfalls, the ethical problems” and risks, he says.

“I think the biggest challenge for us, and really for probably any school, is to figure out how to use these tools in ways that amplify or enhance the kind of teaching and learning that we do, but not undermine our core learning objectives,” Latham says.

“You can’t unring a bell; you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. These tools are out here,” Latham notes, adding that it would be a disservice to students to ignore AI.

Latham says that “we plan really carefully about where AI is best deployed in the curriculum and the pedagogy and where it should be avoided.” One of those areas where AI should be limited, he says, is English instruction.

A lot of ideas are communicated in writing, and that involves critical thinking skills, Latham says. “I think students need to go through the cognitive work of framing an idea, figuring out how to express it, thinking about the evidence they’re going to use, how they’re going to structure an argument,” Latham explains.

ChatGPT can create an essay, but that deprives the student of the struggle involved in framing ideas, which in turn erodes critical thinking skills. An experimental study by MIT researchers supports the idea that cognitive skills are compromised when using AI, but the study also notes in its preliminary findings that “rewriting an essay using AI tools (after prior AI-free writing) engaged more extensive brain network interactions.” (See the study at tinyurl.com/568tjud3.)

Punahou’s Candace Cheever adds that “more teachers are doing in-class writing where they can monitor students on school computers with lockdown browsers so they cannot access the internet or AI.”

Social and emotional learning

Teachers are coping with AI’s arrival at the same time they are dealing with leftover effects of the Covid lockdowns, which left students on average with diminished propensity to interact with each other and to speak up in class.

“I feel like there’s more hesitancy for kids to collaborate, communicate in person. So we always try to emphasize a human element in education,” says Kalani High’s Ida.

Now, collaboration is an essential skill. “When we were younger, the stereotype of a programmer was a lone person in their basement just hacking out code,” he says. But now projects require cooperation and working in teams.

Many other teachers mentioned this same issue and say that’s why they are focusing more on social and emotional learning, or SEL. That means more in-class discussions and collaborative learning to encourage students to speak in class – and they say AI tools can support these verbal presentations and class discussions in many ways.

“The teacher is no longer the central figure or authoritarian of content because kids have access to content far more than what we know at this point,” Grantham says. “So, the teacher’s job is going to be much more focused on SEL.”

Teachers will check in on how individual kids are doing. “How’s your group dynamics in your class?” he says. “Do your kids feel comfortable talking? Do you have a safe environment where everybody is contributing?”

At a recent event at Mid-Pacific Institute, a student said he’d be comfortable being interviewed for a job by an avatar or chatbot. But Grantham says some people fear that children will become less social if they have companion bots. “Because now I can just go talk to this friend who’s always going to be nice to me, and I don’t have to worry about dealing with the actual humans in the world, but that’s why human-in-the-middle matters.” Keeping children engaged socially matters more than ever, he says.

On the other hand, the DOE’s Sakurai says AI can help students who have anxiety or social struggles. Conversational tools, including voice-to-text, let them practice safely, which can lead to real-world conversations. Therapists now use AI to help students manage anxiety and learning challenges in ways we never imagined, Sakurai says.

Punahou is also “leaning into discussion skills,” Cheever says. The school brought in educational leaders from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to teach instructors how to engage students in authentic discussions. Substitute teachers were brought in and regular teachers were given two days off to attend a retreat to learn how to conduct effective discussions in their classes.

Grounding tech in Hawaiian culture

Purple Mai‘a is a nonprofit whose mission is to build the next generation of culturally grounded, community serving technology makers and problem solvers. Its website says it empowers community through the application of Indigenous innovation, technology and computer science.

Mike Sarmiento, VP of educational design for Purple Mai‘a, shares an important ‘ōlelo: I ka wā ma hope, ka wā ma mua – we move forward looking back. The future is found in the past.

“The first thing we do is that we understand our ‘ike, our knowledge base, is rich,” Sarmiento said during a discussion during Honolulu Tech Week in September.

“When I think about AI, we start with the framing of ancestral intelligence, about ancestral knowledge.” The common thread or knowledge base has always been ‘āina and mo‘olelo (our stories).

(Hawaii Business Magazine is working on a report that more fully examines how people in Hawai‘i are integrating AI with Hawaiian culture, local values and the specific needs of Hawai‘i. Look for that report in 2026.)

Cacace wonders whether those running AI companies will embrace diversity and cultural identity so AI produces accurate responses. “Do they have our best interests at heart?”

Hawai‘i’s schools are in the early stages of a transformation. AI already supports personalized practice, reduces teacher workload on repetitive tasks, and enables creative projects that were previously impractical. At the same time, it raises difficult questions about access, authenticity, ethics and cultural relevance. The journey has just begun, but Punahou’s Latham is correct: You can’t unring this AI bell.

Revist part 1 here.

What parents need to know

Here are questions parents and guardians should ask their child’s school about its use of artificial intelligence.

1. How is AI being used at the school? In which classes?

2. What are the guidelines for ethical AI use at school?

3. Which AI tools can my child use for homework?

4. How are my child’s privacy rights being protected?

5. Please give me examples of how AI tools will enhance learning.

6. Will my child still learn basic skills like how to write and multiply?

Part I: Meet the Early Adopters in Our Schools

Public school computer science teacher Miki Cacace noticed her daughter struggled to read long passages of text. So Cacace developed a custom AI chatbot that added more white space. Now she has “beautiful reading comprehension,” says Cacace, an award-winning resource teacher in the state Department of Education’s Office of Curriculum and Instructional Design.

Cacace also used AI to help her daughter improve her math and music skills. After they created a song using AI, her daughter told Cacace: “That’s not mine. It’s my ideas, but now I’m going to use this to make it my own.”

“That’s what we need to make students understand: How do I use it to make it my own and use AI as a tool to help me grow,” Cacace said at a panel on AI during Honolulu Tech Week in September.

She is exploring the many possibilities for individual learning using AI and now trains other DOE teachers on how AI tools can save them time and personalize instruction to best fit students’ needs.

LOCAL LEADER IN AI EDUCATION

Gabriel Yanagihara

Another early adopter is Gabriel Yanagihara, an ʻIolani School teacher in emerging technologies such as game design, AI and fabrication. He says he wants everyone in Hawaiʻi to be AI literate, and he’s working toward that goal.

He leads free workshops and boot camps for students and parents, consults for organizations, and has a newsletter and website of free resources (gabrielyanagihara.com). He says he wants parents to learn how the tools work so they can best guide their children in their use.

His students use AI to brainstorm, debug software code, generate visuals, and write dialogue or scripts for their projects. They are creating video games, websites, apps and even books from scratch.

“We don’t just allow AI; we structure how it’s used,” Yanagihara says. “I train students on specific tools and show them when it makes sense to bring AI in and when it doesn’t.” Class projects that were once just “dream-level” are now standard.

He says AI tools have made him more efficient and effective – he has his personal life and weekends back – while improving student outcomes.

Yanagihara says not all schools can afford licenses for AI tools that have guardrails to protect student data. Free versions often lack those guardrails. “That worries me, because it creates an equity gap. My students have 24/7 AI access tied to my lessons, and I can track how they use it in class. Most students in the state don’t have that,” he says.

However, many of AI’s early adopters hope it can enhance equality in education. Candace Cheever, K-12 director of teaching and learning at Punahou School, is optimistic that some AI technology might democratize learning by making tutors accessible to everyone.

AI WILL SOON BE EVERYWHERE

Artificial intelligence is not going away, whether you like it or not, leaders in the field say, and educators must accept and guide the transformation – not be swept away by it. But that transformation won’t be easy.

“This is going to be a huge disruption to our education system,” says Winston Sakurai, executive assistant and chief of staff at the DOE’s Office of Curriculum and Instructional Design.

“Moving a system like we have is very challenging,” Sakurai said at a panel discussion during Honolulu Tech Week. Change, he added, will happen “one classroom at a time, one school at a time” until AI is “like the air we breathe.”

To leverage it for student success, he encourages teachers to try AI and get comfortable with it, so they feel less threatened.

Michael Ida, “Dr. Ida” to his students and colleagues, teaches computer science and math at Kalani High School. He says AI is far more transformative than previous technological advances. “Unlike a search engine or gradual tool upgrades, its range of capabilities – whether generating lesson plans, activities or hyper-realistic images and video – suggests it will fundamentally change professions and daily life,” Ida says.

Most people have trouble recognizing what’s generated by AI. When Cacace trains DOE teachers, she shows them two images of children in a garden: one real and one generated by AI with students it created. Many teachers cannot tell the difference. Her point is that teachers need to learn to understand the basics of how AI works in terms of computer science fundamentals so they can guide students in using AI tools.

“Because if we as teachers are not educating ourselves with these new technologies, how do we then teach our students to be safe and effective users of technology?” The key, she says, is teachers and schools need to choose tools and methods for powerful student learning – instead of students “using it as just something to cheat or something to just get a quick answer from.”

When training teachers about AI, Miki Cacace will show this AI-generated picture and a picture of real children. Many teachers can’t tell which is real. She says, “If we as teachers are not educating ourselves with these new technologies, how do we then teach our students to be safe and effective users of technology?”

AI DESIGNED FOR EDUCATION

Magic School is a national AI platform designed to comply with laws that protect children under age 13, though older students can use it too.

Since November 2024, about 1,500 DOE teachers have been trained on Magic School, which is currently free for them, and they use it for lesson planning and student assignments that they can complete on the Magic School platform. Student data is protected and private, and most work on school devices that are kept at school.

Magic School says its software serves diverse learners, saves teachers time and improves student results.

In Hilo, Waiākea Intermediate School social studies teacher Jonathan Peralto says Magic School is “a lot of fun.” He says the platform’s chatbot, named “Raina,” has helped him improve his lessons and planning. Now, he says, he can modify lessons in minutes instead of hours.

Using Magic School, his U.S. history students role-played Oregon Trail characters, and then wrote three journal entries for their characters’ experiences, with details about their journeys. Then the students could generate images for each entry.

Before Magic School, Peralto used a social studies tool called Humy.ai, with chatbots that mimicked historical figures. Students interviewed George Washington, then asked Thomas Jefferson about writing America’s founding documents. A debate with James Madison taught them about the U.S. government and Constitution.

Peralto and other social studies teachers are now dabbling with a Magic School writing-feedback tool for short responses that students write in class. “It’s pretty unbelievable,” he says, because giving feedback is less burdensome and he can reach more students individually. That’s crucial because each social studies teacher at his school has 130-140 students.

Peralto has also tested AI writing-feedback tools, which help him automate feedback for individual students based on his curriculum. One tool also identified common issues among students’ work, helping him target instruction to build specific skills like citing evidence.

THE URGENCY TO DO WHAT WE SHOULD DO

At ʻIolani School, faculty can use Magic School AI with students from 2nd to 12th grade. “Its strength is that teachers can assign specific AI tools for a class and then turn them off afterward, so it supports intentional use for particular activities,” Yanagihara explains.

ʻIolani high school students will be trying Google’s Gemini AI this year, and already have Perplexity AI and Magic School through their teachers. These are provided under educational licensing currently for select students, which protects teacher and student data.

“I love the AI because it creates the urgency to do what we should have been doing with education for the last 20 years,” Yanagihara says. “You don’t just grade the final paper that’s turned in.”

For example, he uses Magic School for his seventh graders; with it, the students create an idea for a game and include three arguments to discuss. Then Yanagihara assigns each of them a chatbot they can interact with as a thought partner while they are writing their ideas for their game design. The students write a 12-page document that covers details about the game, from the concept and story ideas to the code they need to write. They also include a list of resources. It’s both technical and creative writing.

“I give them access to the tool, and when it’s done – time for the test – I turn the room (in Magic School) off, and then it’s back to me,” Yanagihara says. He can see their chat histories, and Magic School warns him if a student is doing something that’s off-task or concerning.

Yanagihara uses an AI tool that gives students instant feedback on technical things based on his scoring rubric, which assesses things like correct grammar and paragraph structure, after they upload their assignments into that tool. He says using these tools cuts his grading time by 90%. That gives him more time to build relationships with students.

He notes that using AI for assessment can also lighten the burden for English teachers, who grade thousands of papers.

Educators, students and tech leaders gathered at ʻIolani School in September to discuss AI’s evolving role in education. Among those participating from ʻIolani were teacher Gabriel Yanagihara, left, and students Thomas Macchiarulo and Maya Gonsowski.

EXPERIMENTING AND SHARING RESULTS

At Punahou School, 35 teachers volunteered as AI innovators this year, according to Cheever, Punahou director of teaching and learning, who is also an English teacher. For that they receive a small stipend. Their mission, Cheever says, is to “lean in to experimenting with uses for teaching and learning with AI and sharing out what’s working with their colleagues.”

Several English teachers at Punahou signed up to develop an AI literacy and ethics unit in ninth grade, the grade in which many new students join the school. And teachers of fourth through eighth grades get help implementing AI, particularly in the health class that all students take in middle school. In high school English classes, Punahou says, “teachers selectively incorporate AI into specific instructional units to enrich learning, amplify students’ ideas and voices, and ensure that their own critical thinking remains central to the work.”

Punahou Mandarin language teachers Elisa Lo and Joy Lu-Chen signed up for Magic School to learn how to use AI at different levels of Mandarin, then shared their time-saving knowledge with teachers of other foreign languages.

They created custom chatbots to help students and got feedback on their learning. In one level 3 chatbot, “We’d create the prompt and feed it all the information we thought it would need and then have students interact with AI in different ways,” Lo explains. For example, there were grammar patterns and vocabulary the teachers wanted the students to learn.

The teachers created two chatbots that students could interview about student life at Peking University – living on campus and off. Then the students compared what they learned from the chatbots with their peers.

Lu-Chen also integrated Speakology AI into all her classes to provide students with opportunities to practice interpersonal speaking through simulated video chats.

Despite all these uses for AI, the final exam is still a live, in-person conversation.

Among those leading the introduction of AI into K-12 education in Hawaiʻi are, left to right, Brian Grantham of Mid-Pacific Institute. Jonathan Peralto of Waiākea Intermediate School and Winston Sakurai of the Hawaiʻi Department of Education.

EARLY ADOPTER SCHOOL

Mid-Pacific Institute, which still emphasizes a broad education for all its students, was an early adopter of AI. Among its offerings is an Immersive Technology Program.

Brian Grantham, director of educational technology for Mid-Pacific, trained a theater teacher on NotebookLM, a Google platform designed as an AI research tool and “thinking partner.”

“I asked her to give me a famous artist that you talk about in class” and she suggested the famous English actor and director Laurence Olivier. They researched him and created a podcast with two people discussing his acting techniques.

“She was blown away with the accuracy of it,” Grantham says. “This is the same thing that she would always talk about in class, but now she could basically create the podcast and have two people discuss the acting techniques and how he embodied his characters, which comes off way differently than a lecture. And now it has a video feature where it will create a video of interaction.”

Chris Ferry of Mid-Pacific – an English as a second language teacher who calls himself a “champion of multilingual and inclusive learning” – uses AI to differentiate lessons for different kinds of students, whether they are multilingual or have ADHD or dyslexia.

“You will drive yourself into the ground, as a lot of teachers do, trying to prepare materials the proper way for different students,” he says.

AI tools help him design content for individual learners at their language level, which works better than them just using a translator. He follows the Common European Framework for Languages, which works well with AI and can create reading assignments at different levels.

STUDENT AMBASSADORS SHOW AND TELL

Some motivated students have appeared at events and in videos as AI ambassadors, including those at Mid-Pacific Institute and ʻIolani School. A lot can be learned from students, educators say.

One example is former Mid-Pacific student ambassador and now alumna Gianna Groves. She says she was afraid to use AI at first because many people associate it with cheating, but she found it helped her reach her goal: She has been accepted to the architecture school at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. Before that, while learning derivatives in a calculus class at Mid-Pacific, her teacher used a particular method that worked well for her. But when she used ChatGPT to help with a derivative problem, she didn’t understand what the AI was telling her. So she asked the chatbot to use her teacher’s method instead; when it did, she understood what the chatbot was saying.

“That was a pivotal moment for me,” Groves says. “It’s not just a tool there by itself.” The AI tool sometimes needs you to explain to it how you learn, she says. “It enhances your ability to learn and to understand things. It can empower you to be you.”

Mid-Pacific expects students to be transparent in how they use AI. Students must be able to explain their assignments and how they did them, Grantham says. They must be able to evaluate AI work for accuracy and bias, and know that it should not replace their own ideas or thinking. They are also not allowed to disseminate harmful content.

If a student can’t explain what they wrote, that means they used AI as a shortcut that harms their actual learning. “But if you can talk to me about it, and it’s somewhere close to what you wrote, then you use the AI to deepen your understanding.”

Thomas Macchiarulo

ʻIolani students Maya Gonsowski and Thomas Macchiarulo are student directors of ʻIolani’s Digital Literacy Ambassadors program. Some teachers have allowed them to test AI tools like Perplexity AI for research or assess ChatGPT’s ability to write a paper. They say they want to learn about AI but can’t if most teachers don’t want it in their classes.

Maya Gonsowski

“I need at least one course to give me the support to fully understand AI and its capabilities,” Macchiarulo said at a public panel organized by Yanagihara.

He and Gonsowski say students need to be familiar with AI before they’re in college or in the workforce, and teachers should be preparing them for that future now.

This Charter School Is Surfing the AI Wave

Kūlia Academy, a public charter school on Oʻahu, is the first school in the U.S. to offer a seven-year AI and data science program to “grow engineers,” says Executive Director Andy Omer Gokce.

“We need to surf this wave,” he says. The school is located at 2340 Omilo Lane, near the H-1 Freeway and off Kamehameha IV Road, in the former school building for St. John the Baptist Catholic Church. He says students are coming from across Oʻahu: Waiʻanae, Mililani, Kailua, Kāhala and elsewhere.

Kūlia Academy launched in 2024 with a sixth grade class. This year, there’s a seventh grade class as well, and another grade will be added each year through 12th grade. Current enrollment is 150 and is open to all students in available grades.

The academy’s website (kuliaacademy.org) announced in September that the school achieved the highest proficiency scores among all middle and high schools in Hawaiʻi, according to the Strive HI 2024-25 state test results. In math, the school had a 75% proficiency score; in English, it scored 80%. (A student is considered proficient if their test score meets or exceeds the benchmark level set by the state.)

School is from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and most student work is done at school with little homework. Teachers are paid on a 12-month contract and teach in the summer; they can also choose to stay from 3-4 p.m. for extra pay. That keeps salaries competitive, and the teachers union supported this arrangement, Gokce says.

He explains that some households are not suited for doing homework, so students get almost everything done at school, where teachers can monitor them.

And the teachers have fewer students to supervise than regular public school teachers. The teacher load is about 70 students compared with 130 to 150 students in a public middle school, Gokce says, allowing teachers to know their students well.

Gokce, formerly a charter school administrator in California, helped launch the school after years of work with the Hawaiʻi Department of Education; most of his co-founders are now members of the academy’s board. Their goal is to have a public school that prepares students for emerging technologies.

They looked at STEM school models for children that were taught at MIT, Stanford and UCLA, among other institutions.

While Kūlia Academy is focused on AI and data science, students learn to manually code before they use AI so they can understand how algorithms work. They cannot use ChatGPT to produce code. And they learn Python, HTML and later, C++ programming.

The school controls how students use technology, Gokce says, and students are not allowed to bring phones or other devices to school. Instead, they use computers the school purchased with help from a federal grant.

“We have plenty of devices here; maybe double the number of students,” Gokce says. “We have computers and iPads and iMacs here at this school.”

Students also take English, social studies and science, and have other options such as drone programming, music and sports. The school has added environmental science, a subject that often involves a lot of data particularly relevant to Hawaiʻi.

English teachers collaborate with AI and data science classes when students write about data science information and present reports in groups.

Gokce explains that students have to defend their reports, not just present the data. “We ask them to come up with conclusions. What does it mean? Where do we go from here? They need to come and defend what they are proposing.”

He uses a metaphor to explain the focus of the school: “Our aim here is to put them in the kitchen: to design the algorithms, to design AI models.” Students will learn how something works, he says, and that includes computer engineering.

“We want to designate a place where students can take a computer, take it apart, put in some RAM, change the GPU, attack it, install Linux, attack it, harden it, and then attack it again. So, the idea is for them to understand the architecture behind it, how it works.”

Read part 2 here.

INPEACE, among the local nonprofits hurt by cuts in federal grants, has pivoted to seeking new funding while keeping its programs running, CEO Sanoe Marfil says.

For 30 years, the Institute for Native Pacific Education and Culture has built a community by empowering and uplifting Hawai‘i residents of all ages through its three pillars: education, equity and economics, Marfil says.

Its 11 programs are varied but all free. Its Keiki Steps provides Hawaiian culture-based learning for keiki 5 and under and their families, with locations on three islands: Wai‘anae, Līhu‘e and Hilo. Programs meet regularly for enrolled families during the school year.

Another program, Ka Lama, offers training and workshops on topics such as business and financial goal setting; Ho‘āla provides families with information about early childhood education – prenatal to 5-year-old – through events, workshops and one-on-one counseling. The topics include finding and paying for preschool, and long-term real estate planning.

Hi‘ilei provides at-home educational visits to help parents learn about their child’s development through four points: language, cognitive, social and motor skills. Educators also assist with future planning. Meetings are often weekly, and annual participation includes 200 parents, according to the INPEACE website.

Eō is a cultural program that takes place after school and during the summer and prepares children for peer mentorship and leadership roles.

Other programs provide assistance with early literacy with preschool children and work closely with public schools to provide access to STEM programs.

Many INPEACE programs employ a circular model of turning participants into educators – whether it’s the “parents as teachers” model with the Hi‘ilei program, or the “grow your own teacher” model in Ka Lama. Marfil says the continuous engagement strengthens the community.

One parent who grew into a teacher is Chantal Richie, a self-described “local girl” from ‘Ewa Beach, who started participating with INPEACE in 2015 when she enrolled her kids in Keiki Steps.

“I’ve been able to grow as a parent,” Richie says, “but then also as a professional.”

She went on to work for INPEACE – first as an ‘ohana advocate and now as an early literacy coach.

“Being a participant, I was able to get more acquainted with the community, the resources that were available, meet other families, and just have a space where my children could grow and flourish. But we could do it together, and that was such a meaningful time for me.”

Many INPEACE employees start as parent participants, including CEO Marfil, whose child was enrolled in Keiki Steps for over two years. “I really wanted to be with my daughter, grow up with her and be her first teacher,” Marfil says.

She went on to work for INPEACE for 17 years before becoming its chief executive in 2024.

Marfil says she’s gratified that so many of INPEACE’s students have become its teachers. “It gives the organization this sense of pride that the impact we made when they were young has now come back to benefit us through their employment at the organization.”

The nonprofit recently acquired a home in Nānākuli formerly owned by Kaiser Permanente that will be used to house over 20 staff members. It will also serve as a temporary storage site for traveling science exhibits, and as the future home of the INPEACE center for entrepreneurship.

The home could also be used as a site for INPEACE seminars, and the nonprofit might also share it with other organizations, Marfil says. Funds are being raised now to renovate the home.

Despite the loss of federal funding from the National Science Foundation, only the Kaulele STEM program has been affected, and INPEACE has sought to diversify funding and pivoted to keep all staff members employed, Marfil says. The organization is open to securing more funding through grants and private donations.

“We would encourage and invite anyone who is interested, whose mission aligns with ours to donate, partner and see how we might collaborate,” Marfil says.

inpeace.org and @inpeacehawaii on Instagram

The nonprofit says it serves about 3,000 individuals and families each year through a preschool, a Healthy Families program that serves expectant parents and caregivers of newborns, and support services for sexual assault survivors.

Most preschool classes are in a 2,500-square-foot wooden cottage built in 1926 as a private home. The YWCA’s campus also includes a community pool that closed in 2013.

The preschool cottage “has been very well utilized for almost 100 years, and the buildings that we will be renovating are for the most part completely unusable,” says CEO Kathleen McGilvray.

The site’s last major renovation was in the 1980s when the community helped rebuild the YWCA’s program center after arson destroyed the original building.

The goal of the $21 million campaign – called Building a Bright Future for Our Keiki, Families & Community – is to transform the YWCA’s historic campus in three phases. So far, almost half of the $6 million Phase 1 budget has been raised.

When the Hawai‘i Island branch of the YWCA launched in 1919, the county had less than one-third of today’s population, says state Sen. Herbert M. “Tim” Richards III, chair of the leadership committee for the YWCA’s fundraising campaign. “We need to build for a brighter future, which means taking care of our next generation, the keiki.”

The YWCA says its plans call for a new preschool, a multipurpose building and a small housing complex with 10 units for the community’s most vulnerable women and families.

The preschool will feature four dedicated classrooms for children ages 2 to 5, shaded outdoor play areas, covered walkways and a commercial kitchen to support expanded meal service and nutritional education.

“There’s a huge need for child care, especially quality child care and the kind of transformative work our teachers do. And now they will have a beautiful new facility that they deserve, a preschool that’s worthy of our children,” says McGilvray.

In Phase 1, underway now, the pool is being demolished and the preschool expanded. Architect Fleming & Associates expects the first phase to be completed by summer 2026. The preschool is currently at capacity with 90 students and a full waitlist. The new campus will accommodate 130 children.

“Preschool is critical for children’s development, socialization and serves a critical workforce need. Moms and dads can’t work if they don’t have a safe and accredited place to take their children,” McGilvray says. “We are setting children up for success. They are ready to learn. We hear that all the time from kindergarten teachers.”

The Healthy Families staff works with parents on individual and family needs, as well as their babies’ developmental stages and screenings, and connects them with information and support resources. The services are free and confidential.

Since the 1970s, the YWCA has also supported victims of sexual assault. The YWCA says its program is open 24/7 and is the only rape crisis center on the island with short-term crisis intervention and long-term confidential counseling. It also helps with forensic exams and decisions on whether to file police reports.

The fundraising campaign seeks support from government grants, foundations, businesses and individuals.

The YWCA is located just down the road from the Palace Theater, at a historic crossroads. “From a development standpoint, this is a really exciting project in the downtown area. With its high visibility, I think this is going to be a really pivotal project for the revitalization of downtown Hilo,” McGilvray says.

Five years after COVID sent a paralyzing shock through the nation’s public schools, the impact of lost instructional time can still be felt. In every state, fewer young people are able to read and write with appropriate fluency, or accurately solve math and science problems.

In Hawai‘i, 39% of fourth graders and 33% of eighth graders lack basic skills in reading, while 23% of fourth graders and 42% of eighth graders lack basic skills in math, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Known as the “nation’s report card,” the NAEP test is administered every two years at select schools; it’s considered more rigorous than many similar state tests.

Hawai‘i’s 2024 NAEP results still lag behind those from 2019, when 37% of fourth graders and 32% of eighth graders lacked basic skills in reading, and 22% of fourth graders and 35% of eighth graders lacked basic skills in math.

Chronic absenteeism is a lot higher, at about 25% compared with 14% in 2019; meanwhile, 52% of Hawai‘i high school graduates enrolled in two- or four-year colleges, compared with 55% in 2019. The percentage of Hawai‘i high schoolers who meet college-readiness benchmarks, based on the national ACT test administered to all public school juniors in the state, has slipped over the past five years, according to data supplied by the Hawai‘i Department of Education.

But these statistics don’t paint the full picture. Hawai‘i’s public school system is more agile and ambitious than it used to be. Unlike 20 years ago, when the state’s schools consistently ranked among the worst academic performers in the nation – “a perennial bottom-dweller,” as Terrence George, the outgoing president and CEO of the Harold K.L. Castle Foundation, puts it – students now score in the middle of the pack nationally, and sometimes better than that.

“There’s no question in my mind that the Department of Education, with all its continued faults as a huge, old, bureaucratic institution, has made some serious progress,” says George, whose foundation spearheads and funds many educational initiatives. “And it represents the focused work that our teachers and administrators have done to keep their eye on what matters most.”

Since the schools reopened in-person instruction in fall 2021, more and better data have driven many of the improvements. Heidi Armstrong, the DOE’s deputy superintendent of academics, says schools are now assessing students three times a year, using the results to target tutoring and intervention efforts, and offering extensive summer learning programs at 222 of the state’s 296 public schools.

Those efforts are paying off. In February, an analysis of NAEP results delivered welcome news: Fourth and eighth graders in Hawai‘i ranked second in the U.S. in reading recovery between 2019 and 2024, and fourth in math recovery.

Overall, Hawai‘i fourth and eighth grade students performed about 13% of a grade level lower than in 2019 – still considerably better than the national average of nearly half a grade level lower. The analysis was conducted by the Education Recovery Scorecard, a collaboration between researchers at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project.

While Hawai‘i students are recovering from the academic slide more quickly than those in nearly all other states, the ongoing learning lag isn’t entirely unexpected, given the enormous decline in reading and math skills after schools were shuttered. When looking at the worst examples of continued learning loss – a full year in some struggling U.S. districts that didn’t offer extra teaching time – the Education Recovery Scorecard describes the daunting challenge of bouncing back in its 2025 report, Pivoting from Pandemic Recovery to Long-Term Reform:

“In order to make up for a full grade equivalent loss within two years would have required students to learn 150% of what they would typically learn per year – for two years in a row. Without lengthening the school year, dramatically increasing summer learning or providing full-year tutoring to more than a minimal share of students, it was close to impossible for districts to recover from a full grade equivalent loss in achievement over two years. Were teachers simply expected to speak more quickly?”

Hawai‘i’s recovery is the result of many of those exact efforts, aided by the infusion of more than $600 million in federal pandemic-era funds to help schools recover. The final round of pandemic funding was obligated in September 2024.

“The department set out a combination of foundational strategies that we really believed would move the needle in helping us make up that learning loss and then, long term, allow us to progress,” says Armstrong.

“I think that all our systems of support – the universal screening, hearing the students, providing interventions when deficits are recognized – were all crucial to the growth we’ve seen and will be continually important as we move forward, always striving to increase our proficiency.”

“All means all”

Kids growing up in low-income households are more likely to have poor grades and test scores than affluent kids, and less likely to finish high school or attend college. The link is strong and well-documented.

Hawai‘i’s school system is filled with these struggling children and families, as the challenges of managing the basics of life – stable housing, a working car, enough food and clothing for the kids – are as hard as ever. Aloha United Way’s most recent ALICE Report found 41% of local residents barely scrape by or are in deep poverty.

In the 2024-2025 school year, 196 regular public schools and public charter schools – or 66% of all schools – were designated as Title I, which means a disproportionate number of students come from low-income families that qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

Nearly 11% of the state Department of Education’s $2.18 billion annual budget in 2024-2025 comes from federal funding, much of it specifically targeted for Title I schools and special education. Schools have historically relied on the federal money to hire people to help in the classroom and fund professional development, new technology and academic programs – all of which have helped Hawai‘i students bounce back academically.

In March, massive layoffs were underway at the U.S. Department of Education and the department itself was targeted for closure by the Trump administration. Responsibility for distributing Title I and special-education funding was expected to move to another, unnamed agency. The Hawai‘i attorney general joined 20 others across the nation to try to block the department’s dismantling.

Meanwhile, the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP test for the Education Department, had been gutted to a tiny handful of employees, making future testing unlikely.

Amid the chaos, teachers and administrators in Hawai‘i that I spoke with said they were very worried about funding delays and cuts. But they were also determined to continue helping students to progress and maintain the momentum they’ve achieved so far.

“My whole theory is ‘all means all,’” says Jhameel Duarte, the principal at Kīpapa Elementary, which dedicates a half-hour block each day to grouping the entire student body by the extra assistance they need, whether it’s with reading comprehension or phonemic awareness. She expects such strategies will continue, no matter what happens.

“Some of our kids need acceleration and so they get that, but there are a lot of kids who still need support. What we’re trying to do is make sure that we’re closing our gaps,” Duarte says.

Here’s how Kīpapa Elementary and two other Title I schools are making strides for all their students.

Case 1: How data helps a small Mililani school make big gains

Kīpapa Elementary is a well-kept school in the suburb of Mililani. It’s also the area’s only Title I school, with about 50% of its 485 K-5 students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunches, according to fall 2024 data from the Hawai‘i DOE’s Child Nutrition Programs.

The school was founded in 1932 – before the area was known as Mililani – for the children of farmworkers in nearby plantation fields. Today, Kīpapa Elementary is hemmed in by houses, condos and apartments, and a public housing complex across the street.

Duarte is the school’s dynamic new principal, having arrived in June 2023 as one of dozens of new principals who stepped up during a wave of pandemic retirements. She says the school was performing below students’ capabilities at the time.

Her 20-year career as a teacher and administrator at Title I schools across O‘ahu – at Pālolo Elementary, William P. Jarrett Middle, Wahaiwā Middle, Waialua High and Intermediate, and ‘Aiea High – had turned her into a forceful proponent of student data, both collecting it and using it. Without data to pinpoint those who need extra help, and data to make sure they’re improving, a person’s life can derail, she says.

“I’ve had kids in ninth grade not being able to read, and what happens? They stop attending school, which is very difficult to watch. I’ve seen kids not graduate, and that’s heartbreaking,” Duarte says. As an educator and school leader, “I can do something to make sure they’re not falling through the cracks.”

Charts and graphs line the walls of her office and a staff-only room where grade-level teachers and academic coaches meet every two weeks to talk about assessments, instruction and curriculum. They’re supported by extra classroom tutors, hired with Title I funding, who help run small-group sessions in core reading skills.

The charts and graphs clearly show how every grade level, classroom and student performs in core subjects, both now and in the past. “The first level is just understanding what your data is saying and where your kids have been,” Duarte says.

One chart tracks scores from the state’s annual Smarter Balanced Assessment and links the information to specific teachers and academic priority areas. Others show results from the triannual “universal screeners” that gauge proficiency in real time. More fine-tuned assessments pinpoint what a student needs help with, such as sounding out words.

An interactive chart assigns every student with a red, yellow or green card to show if they’re struggling, in the middle or solidly meeting targets. After new assessments, a student’s card is placed in the low, middle or high section, which quickly shows who is making big improvements, and who is slipping and may need counseling or other interventions.

As a leadership aid, a circular graphic outside Duarte’s office matches photos of teachers and staff to their personality traits. Duarte says it’s a quick reminder that she may need to modify her “dominance/action” style to better connect with the “steadiness/reflective” types. Another data point that she’s especially proud of is parent attendance at school events, at 100%.

After a single year of this intensive, data-driven approach, Kīpapa Elementary’s proficiency scores jumped dramatically on the 2023-2024 state achievement tests:
• 66% of students were proficient in English language arts, up 13% from the prior year
• 67% were proficient in math, up 20%
• 63% were proficient in science, up 17%

Duarte says she was shocked to see last year’s “phenomenal scores,” but cautions that 2024-2025 scores will probably be lower as “it’s a different set of kids and a different set of dynamics,” with “more accentuated behaviors” on display this year.

And she recognizes that the stress of so much testing can be hard on students, who sometimes express their frustrations on the Panorama student survey – another regular test that gauges social-emotional health.

While testing is necessary, she says, it isn’t the main objective. “It’s really about the individualized needs of kids, making sure that each kid is closing the gap, each kid is being successful, each kid is being celebrated for their growth.”

Tutor Lori Gibson with students Mina Lakjohn and Moroni John, who received $100 gift cards from the Rotary Club for being top attendees of the Ocean View afterschool tutoring program in the Ka‘u district of Hawai‘i Island. Graduation rates for the Marshallese students attending tutoring rose from 0% to 100% in a single year.

Case 2: Helping Marshallese students in Ka‘ū advance and graduate

Ka‘u High & Pahala Elementary School, on the southeast side of Hawai‘i Island, enrolls about 500 students in grades K-12. It’s a particularly high-needs school, where nearly 98% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Surrounded by agricultural land, the school serves rural communities stretching across 922 square miles of the vast Ka‘ū district, from Pāhala to Nā‘ālehu-Wai‘ōhinu to Ocean View.

Many of the Ocean View students, or their parents, are originally from Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands, says ‘Āina Akamu, the complex academic officer. About 37% of the Marshallese students fall below the poverty line, which in Hawai‘i is currently $36,980 for a family of four; they make up about one-fifth of the school’s student population, he says.

Some of the students live in rudimentary houses perched on the lower slopes of Mauna Loa, 5,000 feet above sea level and often miles from the school’s bus stop. A few have a two-hour walk from the upper sections of the Ocean View grid to the morning bus, says Akamu.

The students face a daily odyssey, descending the mountain on foot on cold, dark winter mornings, dressed in shorts and Crocs, and dodging menacing dogs and vehicles careening down the roads, he says. Once they make it to the bus stop, it’s a 26-mile ride to school.

When they get there, they confront language barriers and cultural differences. Most struggle to keep up with the lessons, or don’t show up at all. Only 16% of the Marshallese students regularly attend school, says Akamu. Until last year, none had made it to high school graduation.

Since returning in the 2021-2022 school year, Ka‘u High & Pahala Elementary School has run after-school tutoring and summer-enrichment and credit-recovery programs. Last year, when federal pandemic money ran out for summer school, the state made a $20 million allocation across the public school system to keep the summer-learning programs intact; funding for summer 2025 was still uncertain in early April.

But those efforts weren’t reaching the Marshallese students. “We take a holistic approach and ask, what do kids need?” says Akamu. “It’s not sitting in front of a computer and doing packets of math. You can’t just tutor after school – you need people who will champion something bigger.”

The school stepped up with additional assistance. It partnered with St. Jude’s Episcopal Church in Ocean View, near the town’s main artery, Hawai‘i Belt Road, to host the students four afternoons a week during the school year and five days a week in the summer.

When the school bell rings in the afternoon, a special tutoring coordinator drives the Ocean View kids in a bus to the church, where she makes them snacks and meals. About 80% to 90% of the Marshallese students attend tutoring, says Akamu.

For academic help, they use a new online option, Tutor.com, for live guidance from qualified tutors, rather than the more common format of prerecorded lessons or AI chatbots. The online service is free and open to all Hawai‘i public school students.

When the after-school session is over, the coordinator drives the students from the church to their homes, scattered across the vast neighborhoods of Ocean View.

Back on campus, a new coordinator for the Marshallese community is helping to build relationships with the families, and the school distributes free boxes of food from the nonprofit Food Basket, hosts Marshallese-focused events, and aids students’ morning treks with supplies such as rain jackets, reflective backpacks, sturdy shoes and flashlights.

The special tutoring program has delivered strong results, based on ambitious but realistic goals. “Our success metric is the percentage of kids who move on to the next grade level or graduate on time,” Akamu says. Last year, 88% of kids in tutoring moved up, and all the seniors graduated on time.

Case 3: After-school options for the “dangerous hours” of middle school

Principal Michael Harano is an old hand at managing the awkward, vulnerable and – aside from the toddler years – “most volatile time in a child’s life,” which are the sixth, seventh and eighth grades, he says.

For more than two decades, he’s led Washington Middle School, located in the densely populated neighborhood of McCully in urban Honolulu. It’s the “most ethnically diverse middle school in Hawai‘i,” he says, and includes kids of Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Chinese, Native Hawaiian and Micronesian descent, among others.

Harano’s approach is more relaxed than many administrators. He says he doesn’t fixate on test results but prefers to focus on what’s most important to middle schoolers: keeping them safe, pushing them to do their best, helping them figure out what they like and what they’re good at, and creating a sense of belonging.

Academically, the school falls in the middle range among O‘ahu’s middle schools, with fewer than half of students showing proficiency in core subjects. But its overall growth scores, which measure student progress, put it among the top six middle schools on the island, according to 2023-2024 data from the DOE: 61% growth in English language arts and 66% in math.

Washington students generally have so-so scores in sixth grade. Harano says those scores typically dip in seventh grade and then, as learning accumulates, they pick up in eighth grade. He says that helping students master a handful of core concepts each year – such as slope and y-intercept problems – is key to developing the problem-solving skills they’ll need to take standardized tests. Since schools reopened, he says many of the faculty have bought into this idea.

And his attention to the students’ social and emotional needs has led to rich after-school programming. Unsupervised hours, he says, are “a dangerous time for kids,” when they’re more likely to engage in shoplifting, drinking, drug use and other risky behaviors.

Structured activities are especially important at Title I schools such as Washington, where 68% of students qualify for free and reduced-priced lunches. Most of the students’ parents don’t have the kind of jobs where they can pick up their kids at 2:15 and drive them to dance lessons, Harano says.

So programs are brought to the students. One is the math team, which developed under the guidance of teacher Sun Park and now has 30-plus members who meet every day after school. Once a dark horse on the competition circuit, the team’s top eighth graders now consistently win the state MathCounts contest against heavyweights such as ‘Iolani and Punahou.

“Mr. Park got them to believe that if you work hard, then you can win,” says Harano. “We don’t go into a competition now and concede anything. We believe we’re going to win.”

All students also have access to extracurriculars and homework help from two well-regarded after-school programs, After-School All-Stars Hawaii and the Boys & Girls Club of Hawaii, whose two-story Spalding Clubhouse is located on the campus’s southern perimeter.

School is out, but the learning goes on

After-School All-Stars, a nonprofit supported by grants and philanthropy, runs programming at 13 middle schools on O‘ahu and Hawai‘i Island, including Washington Middle. Students get homework help and tutoring, as well as take part in activities such as drama classes, pickleball, basketball, arts and crafts, cooking classes, leadership opportunities and gaming matches. The program is free for families and runs until 5:30 on school days.

The Boys & Girls Club offers similar options, including sports, activities and homework help, as well as a relaxing space to unwind. “Kids should be who they are, and we allow them to be,” says Danielle Trinidad, the clubhouse director, who jokes with the older kids on our tour of the facility. “Even the troublemakers are just misunderstood,” she says with a laugh.

The center hosts about 150 students a day, from elementary school through high school, and charges a small monthly fee. It offers summer and intersession options, including field trips, and usually runs until 6 p.m.; on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the center stays open until 7 p.m. for high schoolers.

These kinds of all-inclusive programs are rare at middle schools. The state’s A+ after-school program operates in elementary schools, while middle and high schools are largely left to create their own programs.

About 70% of Hawai‘i’s children have both parents or their single parent in the workforce, according to a 2016 report from UH Mānoa’s Center on the Family. That leaves thousands of young people adrift on weekday afternoons, and during the long summer, holiday and mid-semester breaks.

The Hawai‘i Afterschool Alliance, located on the UH Mānoa campus, connects public schools with organizations offering afterschool programming and maintains a database of services. Paula Adams, the nonprofit’s executive director, says she’d love to see structured after-school programs rolled out more widely to the upper grades.

“There’s this assumption that middle school and high school kids can take care of themselves, but we know that these youth need a safe place … where they can be with their friends, finish their homework and have fun,” Adams says.

She’s worried about cuts to federal grants that pay for much of the after-school funding in Hawai‘i’s public schools.

“If that funding doesn’t come, what is going to happen with afterschool programs?” she asks. “It’s something that not only the state should be involved in but also the city and counties because we don’t want thousands of kids alone in the after-school hours.”

While after-school programs at the middle and high school levels are spotty, summer learning is thriving. Before the pandemic, the DOE ran summer school programs on 30 campuses; in 2024, it had programs at 222 sites. The department offered standard credit-recovery classes and accelerated classes, and a wide range of enrichment programs.

Last summer, 27,660 students attended summer school across the Islands, according to state DOE data. About 45% were elementary school students, 22% were middle schoolers and 33% were high schoolers. All programs were free.

Another new learning option is the DOE’s virtual tutoring program, Tutor.com. So far, it’s been used by 4,593 students, for a total of 12,528 sessions with a live tutor, says Teri Ushijima, assistant superintendent for the DOE’s Office of Curriculum and Instructional Design, who oversaw the project’s development and launch.

The service is available 24 hours every day, and includes a writing component that lets students submit their essays for personal feedback. The service also helps students taking accelerated AP classes and preparing for the ACT and SAT college exams.

Linking Education to the Real World

In recent years, a wealth of new programs has been launched to give public school students the kind of real-life, hands-on experiences that make learning relevant in their lives. Career and technical education, ‘āina-based education and early-college programs can be found in schools across the state.

One of the newest initiatives is “work-based learning,” which relies on outside “intermediaries” who bring together companies and schools for career fairs, classroom talks, apprenticeships and internships.

The Hawaii Workforce Pipeline is one such intermediary. Founded in 2020 by Rachael Aquino and Jennifer Sagon-Taeza, the nonprofit now works with 83 public schools across Honolulu and the Windward side, from Waimānalo to Sunset Beach.

A cohort of students at Farrington High School, for example, is working in paid apprenticeships at the Blood Bank of Hawaii to become certified phlebotomists. When they finish, they can jump into jobs immediately or use the training as a launching pad into different health care roles, says Aquino.

In another example, Hawaii Workforce Pipeline has paved the way for Windward students to train to become registered behavioral technicians, now in short supply. Students work in special-education classrooms, and their online coursework and licensing exams are paid for by the nonprofit.

Before starting the organization, Aquino was the senior program manager for the COPE Health Scholars Program at Adventist Health Castle. The internship attracted “these amazing private school students who were going to be successful without my help,” she says. But the public school students, she says, needed a head start.

“If you don’t start soon with career awareness, then when opportunities are happening later in high school and college, our public school students aren’t ready,” says Aquino. “They don’t always have the same resources, or examples in their families of doctors, nurses and engineers.”

Sagon-Taeza, a curriculum specialist, says education in Hawai‘i, perhaps counterintuitively, may have benefited from the pandemic, which spurred educators to be “a bit more creative” and innovative with their programs and policies.

Will Progress Continue?

In 2002, the Bush administration rolled out a controversial law called No Child Left Behind. It mandated high-stakes testing of all students and administered penalties for schools whose students failed to show adequate yearly progress.

George, the Castle Foundation’s outgoing leader, says that despite being widely vilified, the law put Hawai‘i on the “path of actually caring about data on student achievement and being able to disaggregate the data based on socioeconomic status and ethnicity.”

Eventually, Hawai‘i schools became adept at gathering and analyzing data that “we created for ourselves, not for Washington, D.C.,” he says. Individual schools now have their own specialists and teams that sift through the data and use it to improve students’ learning.

Another major trigger that influenced public education, says George, was the Obama-era Race to the Top of 2009, a $4.35 billion U.S. Department of Education competitive grant that required states to adopt higher standards to qualify for funding awards. Hawai‘i’s Smarter Balanced system is a product of that.

“Before, we had hundreds, if not thousands, of standards that teachers were trying to comply with,” says George. “Now it’s down to a smaller number that are more aligned with not just rote academic regurgitation of knowledge, but actually demonstrate the ability to find different ways of solving a problem, to analyze a passage, to state an opinion and back it up with evidence.”

Armstrong, from the state Department of Education, says Hawai‘i elected to use the Smarter Balanced Assessment to align its content with national standards and to be able to compare proficiency results with other states.

“Our standards are very robust,” she says, “specifically in our math and our English, social studies and science. Our CTE (career and technical education) standards are matched to industry expectations because we know that the purpose of K-12 schooling is to allow students to leave with the knowledge, skills and dispositions to be successful.”

When she was a teacher, the state DOE’s Ushijima says each classroom and school “did a lot of individualized things.” But for the past two decades, “we’ve moved toward data-driven decision-making, looking at student work collaboratively, and we have a vetted, quality curriculum so everyone’s going in the same direction.”

The pandemic brought a potentially insurmountable amount of learning loss among students. Yet many educators say it also brought opportunities for reinvention and a renewed focus on getting Hawai‘i’s kids up to speed in reading, math and basic academics. The sense of urgency it spurred among educators and school administrators has helped make Hawai‘i a national leader in terms of bouncing back to 2019 levels.

Given the progress so far, what’s to stop Hawai‘i from becoming a top-performer across the board, joining such states as Massachusetts and Vermont?

“Why did we move from a bottom-dweller five, and Arkansas did not, or Alabama did not, or Mississippi did not?” asks George. “We did something right, and we have that in our DNA. We can continue to push upward.”

Children, families and school groups that come to the center next to Kaka‘ako Waterfront Park learn while playing with displays and toys that engage their senses of touch, sight, hearing and smell. Visitors first enter a large room filled with colorful displays, and an automated voice encourages them to “imagine a world where everything is kid-sized.”

On the center’s first floor, children can play countless roles, such as a weather reporter, bus driver, clerk or scientist. One area helps children learn how the different parts of their bodies, such as the heart and the mouth, work together. The first and second floors include a stage with costumes and props and a puppet theater where children can perform stories straight from their imaginations.

The second floor explains the history of Hawai‘i, while the floor above it contains exhibits explaining the history and culture of various countries, including Japan, Vietnam, Korea and China. In addition, a water exhibit teaches children about rainforests here and around the world.

Before founding the center inside the Dole Cannery in 1989 with only volunteers, Yajima visited children’s museums across the mainland to see what types of exhibits and programs engaged children. In 1998, the center moved into its current building with 45,000 square feet of space – almost the size of a football field – spread across three floors.

Usher says one of her proudest achievements is the center’s Discovery Camp program, which started in 2005 and is often offered during school breaks. The camps have themes and include hands-on activities, outdoor play, a visit to the center’s exhibits and a supervised lunch.

During the Covid pandemic, Usher says, the center rose to meet community needs by keeping some programs open even though the center itself was closed due to state mandates.

“It felt amazing to really be able to support our community … It really became a win-win for everyone, because we were able to care for the children of essential workers and keep our teachers employed,” Usher says.

“Being able to see the kids still interacting with each other when they would normally have to be at home, that’s incredible.”

Since the pandemic, the center has resumed all of its programs, including toddler play time, opportunities for field trips and private birthday parties.

Usher grew up playing in the center with her sisters and other children. It was “like a second home,” she says. As she grew older, she became a teenage volunteer, gained a passion for early childhood education and later earned a master’s in education from Harvard University.

“I really feel like the center is an extension of my family,” she says.

Usher isn’t the only one with a life-long involvement in the center; she says full-circle moments happen frequently, when individuals who attended the center’s programs as children go on to volunteer or work there.

Michael Pietsch has watched the center and its members grow. Pietsch attended Punahou School with founder Loretta Yajima and has sat on the center’s board for over 20 years.

“It’s really a labor of love and Loretta lived it to the fullest,” he says.

“They get to pick their bikes, get to customize it. Some people trade in their bikes if they see something better. So I think it’s a really cool space for people after school to come and just engage with their peers, get to know new people,” says KVIBE Program Coordinator Savelio Makasini.

Bruce Konman, pictured, joined the program as a teen and now manages the KVIBE shop.

Makasini says KVIBE started in 2005 to promote physical activity but “it’s evolved into mental health, spiritual health and safe spaces.” The program now incorporates peer mentorship, community dinners, volunteer opportunities, life lesson workshops and cultural activities.

“We always say at KVIBE that our bikes are our modern canoes, our urban canoes, taking us places just like the Hawaiians did with their wa‘a.”

kkv.net/kvibe

Nine years ago, stay-at-home mother Mio Chee was running out of education options for her two sons, then in the third and seventh grade.

The younger son had a bad experience with a teacher, and Chee pulled both from the small private school they attended. Because of the issues then faced by her younger son, Chee believed the same problems would arise if they simply enrolled in another private or public school.

She believes homeschooling was her only choice despite her biggest concern: English is her second language.

“The second biggest concern was just not knowing where to start, what to do, what to expect, because it’s not like we’re excited to homeschool,” Chee says. “We actually did homeschool out of necessity, so we learned as we went.”

But homeschooling wasn’t as hard as she imagined. “We met the right people, the right time, the right kind of support and at the end, everything just worked out.”

Forms Are Required

Parents who want to homeschool their children in Hawai‘i must submit state Department of Education Form 4140, called “Exceptions for Compulsory Education.”

On the form, parents provide information about the student and are required to select one of four “exceptions” to explain why they are choosing homeschooling. Those exceptions are for disabilities (a doctor’s note is required), employment (only applies after age 15), alternative education or pursuant to a Family Court order.

The DOE says in the 2022-23 school year, it received about 4,700 forms signaling parents’ intent to homeschool. But the DOE says it does not know how many children were actually homeschooled.

There are no education requirements or standardization for homeschool academics. However, parents are required to submit an annual report to the DOE that shows how their child is progressing. And Hawai‘i administrative rules require that each homeschooled student complete a standardized test in third, fifth, eighth and 10th grades.

DOE Educational Specialist Sara Alimoot says, “Homeschooling is a parent-initiated education alternative, so when a parent chooses to homeschool their children, they’re taking on full educational responsibilities.” Those responsibilities include socialization, curriculum, athletics and extracurriculars.

The federal DOE’s National Center for Education Statistics most recent figures show that in 2019, 2.8% of American children ages 5 to 17 were homeschooled – an estimated 1.5 million students.

But the National Home Education Research Institute, a nonprofit that supports homeschooling families, reports a much higher rate for the 2021-22 school year: about 3.1 million homeschooled students in grades K-12 – roughly 6% of schoolage children.

Advocate for Homeschool Families

Peter Kamakawiwoole, director of litigation for the Home School Legal Defense Association, a Christian nonprofit based in Virginia, was homeschooled while growing up in Hawai‘i. He says he now helps families all over the nation with legal issues they encounter while switching to homeschooling.

When Kamakawiwoole was about to enter kindergarten, his mother left her teaching job to homeschool him and then went on to homeschool his siblings.

“Homeschooling is first and foremost family- and parent-directed,” he says. “What that means is it will look differently based on what the family wants it to look like.”

While some families follow the homeschooling stereotype of being locked up at home all the time, poring over books, that’s not common, especially in Hawai‘i, Kamakawiwoole says.

“It’s hard to stay inside when you live in some place like Hawai‘i,” he says. “The local culture is very communal. Everybody is Uncle and Auntie, everybody’s outside.”

He says another invalid stereotype is that homeschool families are antisocial and poor communicators.

Maile Higashi is a homeschool mother of four children and the District 1 regional director for the National Christian Forensics and Communications Association. She also oversees Hawai‘i’s Christian Speech and Debate League – a group open to all students, not just Christians and homeschoolers.

Higashi says she originally had no plans to homeschool: The idea sprang from the successful homeschooling of her husband’s cousin. When raising their first child, Higashi and her husband decided to see if it would work for them too – and have since gone on to homeschool all of their children.

Because she teaches them one on one, she says, her children can develop their interests and personalities early on.

“My 16-year-old is passionate about flying, so he is currently working on his pilot’s license and flight school,” she says. “Who knew that at 16, 17 he could become a private pilot?”

Homeschooling allowed an easy educational transition as the Higashi family moved from Seattle back to hawaiʻ’i to be closer to family. | Photography: Aaron Yoshino

Not One-Size-Fits-All

The reasons for homeschooling vary from family to family.

Chee, the mother who pulled her two sons out of a Honolulu private school, was concerned that her background was different from her sons’. Originally from Japan, she learned in ways that aren’t taught in Hawai‘i. For example, she says that she was taught math with the metric system and wasn’t taught English in a classroom setting, so she never learned phonics.

However, she found that locating teaching material for her sons wasn’t difficult.

“That was the biggest issue or concern for me, but at the same time I knew that they had a lot of resources,” Chee says. “We are fortunate enough to be able to hire tutors for the subjects that they really needed help with.”

Because of her sons’ five-year age difference, Chee used different methods for each, as well as an online program that followed the same curriculum as some private schools.

She used both online programs and traditional sit-down learning with her younger son, Micah, who was still learning fundamental skills.

“My main goal was to teach him how to read and write so that he can be a little more self-directed and if he wants to, he could attend school later on,” Chee says. “I was spending more time with Micah and making sure that he was able to get all the help he needed.”

She says she didn’t need as much help with her older son, Dyson, who had attended conventional schooling longer. Instead, she outsourced his learning to “high-level intellectual experts” who were able to explain the nuances and niches that he was interested in. She says her biggest contribution to Dyson’s homeschooling was connecting him to local experts, driving him to the right opportunities and helping him make friends.

Like other parents, Chee found it easy to connect with other homeschool families through social media. She joined Facebook groups and coordinated with other families to plan gatherings and grow friendships.

“It was pretty easy. There are always opportunities,” she says. However, because the other families live elsewhere on O‘ahu, “there’s always driving and planning involved.”

Social Media Support Groups

Those same Facebook groups also served as a guide for Chee when she started homeschooling. She says that seasoned parents had a lot to share – she could just type a question and other parents would answer.

“There’s so many people who are happy to share and support, so that was really enticing for me,” she says. “I didn’t have to spend hours Googling trying to find answers. So that really made it easy and I felt a sense of support in the community.”

Dyson stuck with homeschooling until he graduated from high school, but after three years Micah enrolled in a charter school so he could see his classmates and friends daily. But without homeschooling, Chee says, “I really don’t know where our kids would be. Their life would be very different.”

Dyson Chee graduated from UH Mānoa in 2023 and Micah Chee graduated from high school in May and is now attending Kapi‘olani Community College.

“I know that most people – like 99.9% of the homeschooling families that we’ve met through Facebook and also in person – they are very happy,” she says. “The key is parents know what works for their kids, and also always trying to listen to what the kids want and need and try to cater to their needs.”

Vouchers and Education Alternative

Sixteen mainland states provide school vouchers – money that parents can use to help pay for private or religious schools or homeschooling.

Corey Rosenlee is a former teacher at Campbell High School, former president of the Hawai‘i State Teachers Association and now the Democratic candidate for state House District 39 (including Royal Kunia, Village Park and Ho‘opili). He says that adding a voucher system in Hawai‘i would widen the gap between rich and poor families.

Instead, Rosenlee says, the state should focus on repairing public schools.

State Rep. Elijah Pierick, the Republican incumbent in District 39, and Republican Rep. Diamond Garcia of District 42 introduced a bill in 2023 that, if enacted, would have established a scholarship program similar to school vouchers. The bill failed to pass.

Pierick says that if people are mandated to pay state income taxes, “parents should have liberty and freedom when it comes to the education of their children.”

“If the parents then choose to homeschool their kids or send kids to private school, I don’t think that their state income taxes should be going to public schools,” he says.

However, Pierick doubts such a bill would ever pass as long as there is a Democratic majority at the state Legislature and a Democratic governor.

Vouchers promote freedom, individual choice and competition among schools, he says, which “isn’t the main focus of the Department of Education and the teachers unions.”

“We’re a Family of Options”

Brandon and Kathy Bell, owners of HI Insurance & Financial Services, educate their children through a private online school and believe that the more options given to families, the better.

“We’re a family of options,” Brandon Bell says. “The more options you have, especially with schooling,” the better choices parents can make.

The Bells’ two daughters attend an online school, which gives them the freedom to enter more golf tournaments than they would otherwise.

“I honestly wish that I had what they have now for like this online platform … when I was in school,” Brandon Bell says.

Their oldest daughter, Arianna, is now a junior at an NCAA-approved online school – a key consideration when they selected a school as she is preparing to continue her golf career in college. The Bells chose that format after seeing her thrive when schooling went online during the pandemic.

During her last year at Punahou School, her teachers noted that she missed a lot of classes because of her golfing, even though she played on the school’s team and only attended Hawai‘i tournaments.

At their daughters’ online school, “There’s more options for different types of courses they can take, compared to what you would normally find at an in-person school, whether they’re public or private,” Kathy Bell says.

After seeing Arianna thrive through a year of online classes, the Bells enrolled their youngest daughter to start this fall.

“It just allowed us a lot of flexibility. And so far in our first year, it’s been great.”

David Lassner is stepping down as president of the UH system at the end of 2024, 11 years and four months after being named interim president.

That’s a remarkably long run: None of his three predecessors had the job for more than five years. And the latest nationwide survey by the American Council on Education found that in 2022, university presidents had been on the job an average of 5.9 years.

UH is currently searching for Lassner’s replacement, with finalists expected to be named by September and a new leader announced in October. The university expects the 16th UH president to start work in January.

Lassner sat for an exclusive interview with Hawaii Business Magazine to share what he wants to do while he’s still leader of the 10-campus system and his plans after stepping down in December. The interview has been lightly edited for length and conciseness.

Q: Was it always your plan to step down after this year?

I started thinking about it, I’m going to say, three years ago. Every year when I had the annual discussion of my performance and evaluations with the Board of Regents chair – about how can I do better, what do they really like? – the question of succession always came up.

Because people don’t last that long in these jobs. The average tenure for university presidents has gone down nationally from over eight years to under six years, and here is probably even shorter. So years back, I told the board chair: 2024, that’s enough. If I’m still here, I don’t want to keep going past that. So I’m really happy that I was able to go out when I wanted to, the way I wanted to.

Q: What are your proudest accomplishments?

I have a lot of things I feel good about accomplishing in my previous job too. (Lassner was UH’s VP for information technology and chief information officer before serving as president.) But in this job, I can tell you what people have told me they appreciate. It’s interesting that they really appreciate that it’s calm. We have our bits of drama, but in general, the institution is calm.

When I came into this job, I literally didn’t like to open the paper in the morning, because if there was a story about UH – and there often was – it was negative. And now I feel if something bad happens, we get covered – nobody gives us a pass – but by and large, the public gets to hear about the good work we’re doing. And that has changed attitudes in the community.

We’re financially secure and stable. Our budget balances, our reserves are healthy. When I came into this job, we were at the tail end of the previous recession, and then we had to go through the pandemic and manage through that financially. We’re fortunate there was so much federal support. But I think whoever comes in next will not have to worry about righting the ship financially.

We have a great team. I hope they want to stay and support the next president. I think the UH System is working together, better than ever – all the parts of it. There are times when we compete between campuses, but by and large the leadership works together.

For example in June, I spent two hours meeting with the leaders of all our campuses. We talked about issues around serving students, and how do we do that collectively rather than conversations about “Why are you doing this? I want to do that.” I think that working together is now embedded much more strongly in our DNA.

We’ve really revamped fundraising and the relationship between UH and the UH Foundation. We launched a billion-dollar fund raising campaign last year, which is amazing for this place. The last one was half that size, and we never quite announced it even.

Our extramural funding is going gangbusters. That’s the money we get mostly from the federal government, but also from other sources like private foundations, to do research or educate underserved populations or do service to the state or the region. The last two years have been the best in our history, and we’re going over $600 million this year.

The Isabella Aiona Abbott life sciences building opened on the Mānoa campus in 2020. | Photo courtesy: University of Hawai’i

It’s not just a number, it’s two things. One is $600 million of investment in UH, in our faculty and our students, and we’re creating literally thousands of jobs across the Islands. And these tend to be good jobs to work on research projects.

But it’s also a vote of confidence that all of these (funders) are entities, that when they see a problem or a challenge, they think UH is the entity best equipped to address it.

Q: You mentioned challenges like the pandemic. What were the others you faced?

The pandemic was a huge challenge. And I was super proud of how we came through it. I think, arguably, UH did as well as anybody in the state. Our students continued learning. We pivoted online quickly. All kinds of programs at UH were helping the whole state. We were doing vaccination, testing and training community health workers. Our engagement was huge.

But we pivoted online. We were among the first to say, after spring break, we’re not coming back to class. It was more of a challenge for our faculty because students were already familiar with the online environment and the tools. But we managed to get our faculty online. The bottom line is students were still graduating on time, and we were educating students as we needed to do. Even if they couldn’t go to a graduation ceremony, they still got a diploma. That was all about our teamwork.

The UH Mānoa campus saw many changes during Lassner’s tenure. Bachman Hall, built in 1949 and recently renovated, was where he worked in the office of the president. Students occupied parts of it during the TMT dispute. | Photo courtesy: University of Hawai’i

TMT (the Thirty Meter Telescope proposed for Hawai‘i Island’s Maunakea) was hard for me personally. I’d say it really divided many people inside the university and I had a lot of friends who were very disappointed in me for supporting TMT.

I have no qualms about my belief that it would have been good for Hawai‘i. I got a death threat on social media. We had students peacefully occupying our building (Bachman Hall). When they moved out of their own volition, it felt empty. But I learned a lot. It was really hard seeing the pain that was caused and would have been caused in either direction.

Q: How has the university changed since you became president?

We have more processes in place to help us do routine things. Fundraising is more effective. Our extramural funding capacity is much stronger and more effective, and lets us create jobs and help Hawai‘i.

In June, we blessed the RISE center on University Avenue. (RISE is the Residences for Innovative Student Entrepreneurs student housing facility.) We’re creating a living, learning, work environment for innovation and entrepreneurship. I think that’s going to be a game changer for Hawai‘i.

The Walter Dods, Jr. RISE center on University Avenue opened in 2023 as a student living/ learning community focused on innovation. | Photo courtesy: University of Hawai’i

I think this campus looks better every year, and I’ve been here through thick and thin. When I first came (in 1977), you literally had to take your slippers or shoes off to walk across campus when it rained because the drainage didn’t work and the parking lots were dirt.

I think the way we’ve enhanced the campus and the way it looks is a positive place for students to be proud of.

We improved our graduation rates and our retention rates. When I came into this job, the narrative was you could not graduate in four years because you can’t get your classes on time. So we looked into the data and figured out how to offer classes that students need.

Four-year graduation rates were up significantly at UH Mānoa and UH West O’ahu during Lassner’s tenure but not at UH Hilo. | Photo courtesy: University of Hawai’i

(UH reported that the four-year graduation rates steadily increased at two of UH’s four-year colleges during Lassner’s tenure. Comparing the cohort that enrolled in Fall 2013 and the Fall 2019 cohort, UH Mānoa’s four-year graduation rate went from 34.1% to 41.1% and UH West O‘ahu‘s from 8.9% to 27.6%. However, UH Hilo’s graduation rate went from 20.9% to 21%, with ups and downs in between.)

UH is pretty unique in having all public higher education organized under one Board of Regents and one president. I think we need to leverage that for the people of Hawai‘i to create opportunities on every island for every community, and get them the education they need to succeed.

Q: What is the biggest thing you’ve learned while president?

Stand by your principles. You don’t have to be disagreeable, but sometimes you have to disagree. One interesting thing about this job is you have so many people who think they know what you should do and that their opinion matters more.

Students and faculty believe it’s their university. I will hear from parents when they are unhappy about something. I report to a Board of Regents that is supposed to navigate all this. The Legislature has strong opinions and is more involved at a micro level than almost any legislature in the country. And you must have a relationship with the governor. They’re responsible for navigating the whole state forward, and the university is a huge part of helping the state succeed.

Q: What do you envision for the University after you step down?

We have a very solid strategic plan that lays out the areas in which the university system has to make contributions to help the whole state advance around workforce, student success, economic development, and the relationship between Hawai‘i and Native Hawaiians. I think that’s something that the state’s going to have to do better at.

TMT probably exacerbated the issue. But it also highlighted the fractures that we’ve seen as Native Hawaiians have been traditionally at the bottom of lists you want to be at the top of, and the top of lists you want to be at the bottom of: incarceration, welfare, economic vitality, education and homelessness. It’s something we all have to work on.

The university plays a really big part in that. And I think we’re embracing that now.

If I were staying, I would work on economic development. Coming from a tech background, we’re always trying to get Microsoft to come here – Google, Apple, Cisco or whoever. And we have to invest in our own residents, especially the young people who come to this university, and help them figure out not just how to get a job, but how to create a job, start a small business.

We have homegrown businesses. People I know have 100 to 200 employees and multiple locations around the country. That’s all possible if we help educate and inspire students. Some will start three companies, not all of which will succeed, and that’s OK.

Hawai‘i has to be better at accepting failure. Our innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem across the state is much stronger now than it has ever been.

Q: What’s next for David Lassner?

This is the only place I’ve ever had a real job. I started with a one-year, half-time contract in the late 1970s and never left. I kind of worked my way up to this job unexpectedly.

I’m now working as hard as ever because I have miscellaneous projects that I want to either finish off or leave in really good shape for the next president.

Left: Lassner’s first job at uh was in 1977. Right: Personal treasures line his office shelves. | Photo courtesy: University of Hawai’i

One of the contentious aspects of presidents at the end of their time is they go into what are considered golden parachutes or cushy jobs. The Board of Regents asked me about it, and I just said, “Either I’m gonna say, I’m done, or you’re gonna say, I’m done. And I don’t want us to be fighting over that. Because if you say I’m done, nobody wants to see me collecting a salary and hanging around in this place.”

So I’m going to be president emeritus for no money with a little office in the IT building, which was one of my babies in my last job. I never got to move in there; I was there for the groundbreaking but by the time we opened it, I was already president.

I have some of my old projects that I still have passion for that I’ll be able to help with, and an assortment of things that people think I’ll add value to them.

Lassner says he’ll have more time in retirement to work with the Polynesian Voyaging Society. | Photo courtesy: University of Hawai’i

I plan to travel a lot. I’ll do volunteer work. I’ve been asked about serving on a couple of boards. To those requests, I just said call me back in 2025. I don’t want to make any commitments now.

I’m really interested in conservation, hiking, the environment. I’ll be able to engage more with the Polynesian Voyaging Society.

It’s been a wonderful 47 years, but I’m ready to enjoy a little more of my time.

Q: What advice would you give to the next president?

Have a team you can trust. The people I’m around and trust the most, it’s not that they agree with me about things – it’s that I value their opinions. When I hear those things, they help.

You have to care about Hawai‘i. If you’re not from here, work really hard to learn about this place, what makes it so special, and who are the people who really care about the place, and the university and its role in the place.

The vice presidents and leaders we have are really good people. I hope whoever’s next will really try to mesh with them.

I hope people will really appreciate and support the university. This is just such a treasure for the state. And I think a lot of people realize it and take it for granted. It can really help you when the community, and especially the business community, not only appreciates you but also stands up and says that publicly.

Now, she leads Nā Lālā o ka Pūhala, a community organization that offers weekly classes on how to weave leaves from the native hala tree.

Segovia says attendees start by making bracelets, and eventually can make mats, bottle covers and pāpale – a domed or flat top hat.

The leaves come from hala trees across O‘ahu, Segovia says, including Pouhala Marsh in Waipahu.

The lau hala weaving tradition was passed down to Segovia by master weavers Gwen Kamisugi and Pōhaku Kaho‘ohanohano. Segovia says older generations are honored when their teachings are learned by younger people.

When students make their first hats, it’s the best feeling, she says, both for her and her students. “They will actually be in tears.”

Introductory classes are held every Wednesday at Nā Kūpuna Makamae Center on Ala Moana, near Keawe Street.

lauhala.org