Twenty major claims have been settled in the past five years, at an average of $153,912 a case. This year alone, the Legislature appropriated $1.08 million to pay off four students, including one who was sexually assaulted by a fellow student, one who was run over on a field trip and a third hurt by falling lockers. The report did not say when or where the injuries occurred. Although money for the settlements was appropriated this year, the incidents could have occurred earlier.

In addition, the state spends thousands annually settling claims of less than $10,000. Although the report did not go back five years in this category, it said that in 1994-95, 40 student claims were settled for $45,236, or an average of $1,131 each.

There were 253,396 student injuries reported in 1994-95, 80 percent of which were so minor (a scraped knee, for example) that they required nothing more than a Band-Aid or a soothing word from the school nurse. But about 20 percent were serious enough that the student was kept longer in the health room, or sent home or to a doctor, the report said. With 183,400 kids in school that year, the number of incidents shows some students got hurt more than once. The instructional time lost by the injured students was estimated at 506,791 class periods or 84,465 school days.

"As you can readily see, the costs of injuries to students and staff, and property loss are high, running into the millions of dollars," state school Superintendent Herman Aizawa wrote in a memo summarizing the report. "The educational costs in terms of the impact on student learning, and the human pain and suffering, although difficult to measure, also appear high."

Board member Lex Brodie, who has pushed for years to improve school safety, praised Aizawa for delving into the subject. He said the board must lobby hard for funding to make the recommended improvements.

"This preliminary report tells us that Dr. Aizawa really appreciates the importance of safety, that he understands our moral responsibility for the well-being of our people, our students, teachers and supporting staff," Brodie said in written comments.

Noting that the DOE's safety office had only four staff positions, the report recommended three positions be added, as well as more money for operating expenses. Once the office was beefed up, all safety functions - from developing prevention programs, to doing inspections and investigating accidents - should be centralized there.

The report also warned that staff cuts to the neighbor island district offices effective July 1 could hurt the cause. And it said the DOE must upgrade its computers to keep better track of all student and employee accident reports so trouble spots can be spotted and fixed.

Besides student safety, Aizawa's staff also analyzed workers compensation. Workers comp pays wages and medical benefits to employees hurt on the job, aiming to get them back to work as soon as possible. The Legislature has been changing the statewide system to lower costs.

For the fiscal year 1994-95, 1,179 of the DOE's roughly 40,000 employees filed workers comp claims, an increase of 19.1 percent from the year before. They received $7.3 million - or 28.6 percent - of the $25.6 million in total workers comp benefits the state paid that year.

The department had cleared many backlogged cases and improved accident prevention programs, the report said. But claims managers were still overloaded and the lack of computerized records slowed processing.

Creating 8.5 positions to handle cases on the neighbor islands, devoting one state-level administrator to overseeing the program and automating the claims management system would help, the report said.