Changing Hawaii

By Diane Yukihiro Chang

Friday, May 16, 1997

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Public schools are a sorry place to work

THE Kamehameha Schools are so lucky. Trustee Lokelani Lindsey and President Michael Chun both so desperately want to run the private educational facility for Hawaiians that they are fighting over the privilege and responsibility.

Meanwhile, pity the poor public schools, where teachers are expected to do so much with so little. Not only are they among the lowest paid in the nation, but they had to threaten to walk off the job to win a decent pay raise.

Even with the salary hike, however, many of them continue to face dismal conditions at "the office." Consider the lamentations of "Jo," who teaches at one of Oahu's bigger public high schools. She can readily recount horrifying examples of how her campus is falling apart from lack of funding and attention. Among her concerns are:

An invasion of black and brown widow spiders, infesting the auditorium and classrooms, and even falling on people from the ceiling. An instructor in the science wing reportedly found spider egg cases in every student desk in her room.

Capped pipe outlets protruding from the middle of hallway floors, constituting a hazard for passers-by. Already about a dozen teachers have tripped over these dangerous obstructions. "In February, one teacher fell and injured her knee, requiring three months of physical therapy," said Jo. "She is in regular pain and filed for workers compensation."

Having educators act as professional movers. When renovations were set for 14 classrooms, teachers were made responsible for emptying all files, desks and storage cabinets; packing materials and books into boxes; and transporting them to new locations. "All teaching stopped. We were told to use our students because 'they like to help,' " said Jo. "We needed to physically move desks, tables, chairs, bookcases...and our boxes of books. A box of books weighs 40-60 pounds. I had 43 boxes. Another teacher had more than 100."

The administrative joke known as "passing out supplies." On the first day back to work in August '96, more than 100 instructors stood in a very long line to receive pencils, cellophane tape and other materials they had requested from a checklist the previous June. "Teachers waited 40-45 minutes so as to save the support staff the trouble of putting the supplies in teachers' mailboxes," said Jo.

A penchant to overdiscipline adults. A week after graduation, one teacher of seniors had completed all of her required end-of-the-year duties. Because of the extra hours spent correcting papers after school, she felt justified in leaving campus to get a mammogram. "She received a devastating reprimand from administration questioning her professionalism and competency," reported Jo. "The reprimand, if I may say so, was the strength of an elephant to kill a flea."

THESE complaints don't even taken into account Jo's other concerns about bigger class sizes, less preparation time for instructors, a shortage of teaching supplies, and increasingly unruly and aggressive students.

Let's face it, somebody's priorities are screwed up. Government officials, politicians and state administrators work in decent, even plush, offices while the folks charged with the really important task of educating future voters are tripping in hallways, dodging spiders, moving furniture and being treated like moronic kids who don't know any better.

Unlike at Kamehameha, nobody's fighting over the honor of improving the public schools.