2012-12-06 Windward Transcript Connections

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THATCHER: My name is John Thatcher. I reside in Kaumana. I just want to touch on a couple of things on my testimony, my three page of testimony. I don't want to go through the whole thing. But earlier today Mr. Hirakami talked about the issue of charter school facilities. So we have been a charter school since 2000. And we do not receive any money from the state to build facilities. This is despite an Article X of the Hawaii State Constitution that says “The State shall provide for the establishment, support and control of a statewide system of public schools free from sectarian control, a state university, public libraries and such other educational institutions as may be deemed desirable, including physical facilities therefor.” So this is an issue for all charter schools. That is why you're seeing charter schools having to come to you with facility issues. Our school has been working since 2007 to try to secure this land and get the permits needed, do all the studies. We have informed the community since 2008, when we were first granted the provisional lease of the land by the Board of Land and Natural Resources. And this came about, our ability to work with the Board of Land and Natural Resources, because a law was passed in 2006, I believe it could have been 2007, that allowed for the Board of Land and Natural Resources to take State land and give it to charter schools to use for their facilities. So this was the State’s way of trying to help the charter schools without really spending a lot of money on facilities. We understand the position of the state. We are not opposed to not having facilities built for us like our, are built for other public schools. When we first decided on, when we were first looking at the lots that were given to us in 2007 we looked at the educational specifications for school documents that were put out by the State Department of Education. One of the findings there, one of the suggestions there is if the school had a high school campus that it should be 50 acres or less, or 50 acres or more. It also had other specifications. They had three documents actually - one for elementary, one for middle schools, one for secondary schools. We looked at the properties that were sent to us by the Department of Land and Natural Resources; and of the seven properties that they gave us to look at, two were in residential areas and five were in Kaumana, and they were zoned Agriculture. Now in 2007 when we started looking at this, we also looked at County regulations. And we looked at the County plan and the General Plan because there was no CDP, or there it is no CDP that I believe is current now. The last one for Hilo proper was developed in 1975. There is a CDP for a Downtown Hilo, but there is not one since 1975; and I don’t believe that that one actually applies nowadays. But in the General Plan it did say that, it mentioned charter schools. And it said that charter schools are responsible for selecting their own sites. We also looked at a memo that came from, I think it came from Planning. The memo defined the applicability of State laws; and it said “Charter schools are exempt from state laws, except those relating to health and safety and a few other exceptions (i.e. building, fire, and sanitation codes). The major effect of this exemption is that charter schools located in State Land Use Agricultural districts do not have to obtain a Special Permit.” Now I understand that there have been changes, there have been court cases that have dealt with this. We did not intend to proceed with that guidance after the court cases. We had no intention of trying to bypass the County special use permit. Another issue that I think is relevant here, and when we looked at the properties, we did look for agriculturally zoned properties. So the five that were in Kaumana, the only one that was bigger than 50 acres is the one that we have obtained the long-term lease on. The others were smaller, they were more landlocked. One had utility lines running through it, and they would have been much more 5 EXHIBIT D