2011-05-04 Windward transcript HAAS

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HIRAKAMI: Well, Ted covered a lot of things that I was going to speak about so let me update you a little about charter schools. When we started the Hawaii Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, there were 23 charter schools; and today there are 31. So there has been much growth in the number of charter schools ten years later. But the number of students, we started statewide, we started with about a little over 2500 students and we have about 9500 students this year, expected over 10,000 next year. So it has been exponential growth. And, you know, one thing that rings true with what Ted said is that we don’t get the kind of support that a DOE school gets, and that’s both in per pupil funding and zero dollars in facilities. So they expected us to educate children and somehow find ways to house them. And so we were really inventive in the early days. We rented a lot of places in Pāhoa and we vanned kids all over the town. And then we got our first structure, which was a circus tent, believe it or not. And we started in those humble beginnings in a tent. And, you know, it was our commitment to education and to house our kids in regular facilities because the kids were getting a good education but they were getting it when the wind blows and the rain. As you know Pāhoa has a lot of rainfall, and it was just a horrible condition. So what we did was, and what a lot of charter schools had to do was form private and public partnerships to make facilities come true. So there has been a lot of creative thinking, it has been a lot of hard work. But our kids are proud of their school. I tell you there are three things about charter schools that you all know. One is community, we formed community. And in teaching our kids, we just don’t teach them subjects. Well, we teach them about being part of the community. We are totally involved in community service. We have two full community service weeks where we go out into the community and in an area that was a historically a takers, you know, dependent on welfare and housing and food stamps. We’re teaching the kids to give first, to build up self-worth by being volunteers in the community, to build a better citizenship for the County of Hawai‘i. The other word is choice. We’ve provided choice in public education. There was no choice. There was the public school and private school like Ted said, or the school of hard knocks. Well, so we provide choice. And by proving choice we provide a little competition and everybody gets better, the whole education system gets better. And the third is quality. We want quality. There is no exception for not giving our students the best quality education. So in that quality, when you build quality, you get students to come to your school. We’re built on a business model. If we don’t build quality, we don’t get students. We don’t get students, guess what? We don’t get the per pupil funding. So we would get no funding at all. So that’s the big difference between charter schools. There are five charter schools that are conversion schools. And conversion schools mean that they were chartered with former DOE facilities. So they don’t have quite the problem of start-up schools. Start-up schools in urban areas are easier to find used storefronts like Kress Building and stuff for Connections and Nani Mau. But in the rural Puna, in Pāhoa especially, that’s about the hardest place to start a charter school as far as building facilities. So we’ve come through a long way. But, you know, I like to remind you, your Mayor, you know, I met him when he was a teenager and he was walking to the beach with his surf board in Kalapana, and that kid became your Mayor. And you know what, he always says no tell me how no can, tell me how can. And, you know, that’s the thing that I want to hear from you - tell us how can and make it reasonable. I know there are conditions, and we will do it. Like Gail said we are committed to doing it, but make it reasonable so we can continue this education. You know, 100 years from now it won’t matter what kind of cars we drove or what our bank accounts are but that we made a difference in children’s lives. And so today you have that 5 EXHIBIT A