2011-05-04 Windward Planning Commission Hearing Transcript SP 11-115

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And now I have a daughter who is four years old, we’re in that district. She’s going to Montessori eight days (sic) a School. And I drive by HAAS at least four to week cause I do a lot of the pickup and drop offs there. And, you know, I drive through there usually right before 8 or right after 8 o’clock and the traffic isn’t that bad. I mean there is traffic there but it’s not horrible. And we wait a couple of minutes. I’m never late because of having to wait for HAAS traffic. They keep them flowing in, they keep them flowing out; and the drivers in that area seems to actually kind of flow together. So it’s kind of cool. Some of the conditions that I see here, and I thought for my fellow Commissioners, in a way that’s for a developer, a real estate developer. I don’t see HAAS as a real estate development. It’s a school, it’s an education facility. This is a place for where hopefully when the time is right my daughter will be able to attend there cause she’s not going to go to Pāhoa. It’s not going to happen. (Clapping) And so, you know, that’s my background. It’s where I grew up. And I hope that we can do something as we’re asked to by the community, by the public, to adjust this so it works and it’s not a burden that the school can be opened and maintained and not have this anxiety coming up from oh, we got a year left, we have got to account for a half a million bucks right now. We don’t need that. We need the focus to be on education, on creating leaders and people. And, yeah, I’ll leave it at that. Thanks. (Clapping) I’m still the chairman though. Commissioner Ono. ONO: Yes. I’m sorry I need to make a comment. I was at Pāhoa High School as a teacher. I taught the at-risk students and, frankly, my experience at Pāhoa High was a learning experience for myself. I took the approach of looking at the students as a community, representing the community. So at the end of the year I must honestly say to you that the students taught me more about themselves as individuals. My approach for them was, for example, we did a craft fair for the kids and I told the students I can’t cook, I’m not an artist, I’m terrible at craft work so, but I want to do something for you to show your talents. So we did. We had a culinary experience, we had craft work for the students. And I said you sell those things; and whatever you sell, I’m going to get into trouble with this but too bad I’m retired, it’s yours. You know, you sell it but please understand that the students are, you’re selling it to fellow students so don’t try to make a killing out of this thing. So, anyway we did that. I’m also going to get into trouble because in retrospect I didn’t get the approval of the Board of Health to do the cooking, so, too bad, again. But that was one experience that I did. The other experience that I did was I did an outreach, outreach. I went to the student’s homes. They cut out of my class. I went, after a couple of days, I did go to homes and I had the experience of going into a home that had the smell of pakalolo in there, so I reported it to the parents. The kids came to school and they hated my guts for a while, but it was all right. After a while we got to know each other. They would rather sit on the back steps of my classroom, because we were converting some of the teacher’s dorms into classrooms. And they sat on the back steps and my approach was to sit with them on the steps and not bring them into the room. To me it’s a matter of listening to the students, whether they are at your HAAS program or the public schools. If we look at the students as individuals more, you know, and I think the teachers at Pāhoa did this a lot. So I just want to put in defense of the school and our teachers that we do have good teachers even out at Pāhoa. So I just don’t want to get, it’s a, I didn’t like the -. (Clapping) Thank you. 19 EXHIBIT A