Future PTA leader
touts isle educators

Linda Hodge headed the
Hawaii Parent Teacher Student
Association for 2 years

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By Lisa Asato
lasato@starbulletin.com

Coming off a breakfast meeting with some of Hawaii's educational leaders, Linda Hodge is both hopeful and disappointed.

She is disappointed that Hawaii still struggles with teacher shortages and teachers teaching out of subject area, as it had been 10 years ago when she was president of the Hawaii State Parent Teacher Student Association.

Yet she is happy for the state's strides in accountability and standards.

Hodge, now the president-elect of the National PTA, was also impressed by something else: schools Superintendent Patricia Hamamoto's can-do attitude toward the broad-based federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which Hodge says has "many state administrators beating their heads against the wall."

"After listening to the other states who are sitting there wringing their hands (saying), 'We don't know what we're going to do,' to see the superintendent say, 'Hey, we've got a plan, we're working on a plan, we're pulling people together, we're going to go forward' -- it's just really refreshing," Hodge said last month.

Hodge is the first Hawaii PTSA president to become national president-elect and will be the youngest national president ever when she begins her two-year post in June 2003.

As she sat in the lobby of the Pacific Beach Hotel, where the Hawaii PTSA held its 75th annual convention April 20 and 21, Hodge, 46, recalled more than 22 years of official and unofficial service for the PTA -- coordinating school buses, making phone calls and serving in local, district and statewide posts everywhere from California to Virginia, South Carolina and the District of Columbia.

Hodge was Hawaii PTSA president from 1992 to 1994 when her husband, Bob, a Navy man, was stationed at Pearl Harbor as senior chief combat systems assistant for Squadron One.

Back then, there was no state office, and she was running the organization out of her Iroquois Point home with her three children and husband helping out as staff.

"I spent two years getting everything in order so we could have the office over here by the airport," Hodge said.

They lived here for seven years, and their children went to public school here. Their eldest son, Christopher, graduated from Radford High School.

"There's been times when I was not going to take the next step because I thought I needed to stay home and be a mother, and they said, 'No, you will do this,'" Hodge recalled.

In Honolulu for the convention, Hodge said it was "heavenly, heavenly" to be back.

"I got off that plane and I took two breaths, and I was home again," she said.

"I used to be able to speak pidgin with the best of them."

As the "president in training" of the National PTA, with 6.5 million members and 26,000 local units in 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands and in U.S. Department of Defense schools in Europe and the Pacific, Hodge has set her priorities on reaching more Hispanics and programs dealing with poverty.

"It's scary but it's exciting," Hodge said of her future post. "We just did a huge organization restructure in June. We used to say, 'This isn't your grandmama's PTA.' Well, this isn't even your mama's PTA anymore."

Part of that restructuring includes a new Resource Development Committee, which she chairs, dedicated to get "nondues revenues," including corporate sponsorships and grants from companies, corporations and foundations. The PTA's $12 million annual budget comes primarily from membership dues.

"We've never done a full-fledged, out-and-out 'Let's get money,'" she said. In the first four months of the campaign, the PTA has reached about half of its goal of $1 million.

"We're looking at an organization that did not exist a year ago," Hodge said. "So it's wonderful new times for us to build, grow and lead that organization. You couldn't ask for anything more. There's wonderful people in PTA, to be the leader of an organization like that ... the opportunity, you just (can't) find the words to describe. I've got goose bumps."