PROJECT KAHEA LOKO
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Window to In the pre-Nintendo days of the 1950s, the children of Hawaii had no alternative but to find simpler ways to entertain themselves. They connected directly to the world in which they lived. "We used to build canoes from sticks and race them across the stream," recalled Frank Hewett, a tall, tattooed kumu hula and an award-winning Hawaiian music composer, as he looked toward the ancient fishpond on the edge of Kaneohe Bay, known as Waikalua Loko, that once belonged to his grandfather.
Hawaii’s past
An ancient Kaneohe fishpond becomes
an outdoor classroom, sending students
on an excursion into Hawaii's
cultural and scientific historyBy Mike Markrich
Special to the Star-BulletinIn today's world where many children spend their free time in after-school care, organized sports or locked away in a condo watching TV or playing games like Nintendo, many are cut off from actual experience with the outdoors. To counter this trend, a new educational program, Project Kahea Loko -- literally "the call of the pond" -- buses children from all over Oahu to visit the blue-black waters of Waikalua Loko.
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Many of the Honolulu school children are as excited about what they see and do there as Hewett was as a young boy. Project Kahea Loko is financed jointly by the Federal Department of Education Native Hawaiian Education Program and the Hawaii State Department of Education. Part of its purpose in using the 400-year-old pond is to help Hawaiian children learn in a new way that reinforces their culture."When you learn some things, it's best to learn with all of your senses," says Project Director Herb Lee. "Not just seeing the pond, but feeling, tasting it, smelling and hearing what is going around and inside of the fishpond. In the Western method of education, the kids go to school and they stay in the classroom and they don't get to experience things outside in the environment. We help them relate to something in their culture they can be proud of."
Waikalua Loko was once part of a complex of 488 stone fishponds built on Hawaii's reef flats for more than a thousand years. The early Polynesians recognized the lack of fish on Hawaii's narrow band of reefs and compensated by building fishponds. The ponds were carefully designed to mix sea water with the fresh-water runoff from taro and sweet-potato fields in upcountry valleys. At the right temperature in the resulting shallow, brackish water ponds, the nutrients turned to green algae, which fed schools of baby fish. It was perhaps one of the most advanced aquaculture systems for live mullet and other saltwater fish ever built.
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The walls were carefully tended and to gain access to the fish, special sluice gates, or makaha, were built that allowed small fish in and prevented fully grown fish from escaping. It is estimated that as much as 10 percent of all the fish consumed by Hawaiians came from the ponds.As Hawaii changed from a kingdom to a market economy and the population of Hawaiians diminished due to disease and migration, the fishponds fell into disrepair. Eventually, all but a few would be abandoned and the secrets to making them work forgotten.
This was a history largely unknown to Lee when he came upon the fishpond after accepting a job as a community relations specialist for Pacific Atlas Hawaii, the subsidiary of the Japanese-owned company that was the developer of Bayview Golf Park in Kaneohe.
"I was totally amazed," Lee recalls, "I went down to the pond and I thought, 'How can I have lived here all my life and never have known this place existed?'"
When he learned the developer planned to make holes around the sides of the 10-acre pond as part of the golf course, Lee persuaded the owner to allow the pond to become a community project.
"I had the idea the revitalization of the pond should be geared toward education and I tried to recruit anybody who wanted to help."
He placed public service announcements in local papers and people from the community came to help clear the pond of dirt and mangroves. In 1995, two years after launching the program, he got a call from Sheila Cyboron, a science teacher at nearby Castle High School.
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Cyboron recalls going to the pond "on a fluke." Unsure of what she would find at the fishpond only five minutes from her lab, Cyboron received permission to teach a few of her special-education students about Hawaii fish and plants at the pond."They were so enthusiastic. I saw them change," says Cyboron. She became so excited about the potential of teaching in a natural laboratory that the next year she applied for and received a small grant. Working together with University of Hawaii Sea Grant College extension agent Clyde Tamaru, she helped create an innovative curriculum in which students at the pond learned how to identify ocean fishes and crabs, learned the workings of the ancient fishponds, studied plant identification, heard ancient legends and even learned how to hold a wiggling crab.
The innovative program received recognition and, to Cyboron's amazement, she was named the Windward District Teacher of the Year.
As a result of Cyboron's success and the enthusiastic response of the students, Lee began to see the learning program at Waikalua Loko as a way to bring change to the public school's approach to educating young people in Hawaii, which he did not think served young Hawaiians well.
There are approximately 45,000 Hawaiian school children in Hawaii, collectively one-fourth of all students in public schools. Because Hawaiian students tend to have the lowest verbal and math scores, they are sometimes routinely written off by teachers who do not have the time or patience to teach them. It comes as no surprise that the largest number of special-education students are Hawaiians. Many just give up, and a sense of resentment and failure begins that for many becomes self-fulfilling.
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It is a problem that Ka'ohua Lucas, who was hired on the project as a curriculum developer, has struggled with for much of her professional career. She is involved with the 16-year-old Hawaiian Language Immersion program in public schools that teaches using the Hawaiian language. But she said more must be done."So many of the public schools have failed Hawaiian students that many of our educators have naturally assumed our Hawaiian students cannot succeed," she said. "They don't realize that many of them will respond differently if we could provide them with something they can relate to."
Although the curriculum soon will be expanded to the higher grades, it is now being tested for fourth- and fifth-graders. Each month, 120 mostly Hawaiian students, ages 9-12, come to Waikalua Loko.
Since the program started seven years ago, Lee and other teachers from both elementary and high schools have been pleased by the response of Hawaiian students. "They would just light up," said Lee. "I think it was partly the fishpond and partly the idea that this thing they were learning about was their culture and they had something to be proud of."
In 1998, Lee heard through a friend about the Pacific-American Foundation, a 10-year-old national nongovernmental organization organized to provide grants for Hawaiians and Americans from Pacific Islands. Retired Brig. Gen. David Cooper, Pacific-American Foundation president, helped Lee write a proposal that, with the support of Sen. Daniel Inouye and the Hawaii congressional delegation, won a U.S. Department of Education grant of $1.1 million -- enough to hire Lucas and a full-time staff. Suddenly Lee's small project within the Department of Education at Castle High School grew from the personal motivation of one person to save an ancient Hawaiian fishpond to an established educational program. It is expanding now to every island and is being incorporated into the Hawaiian Language Immersion program.
Can something as simple as visiting a fishpond change the outlook of a Hawaiian child? Lucas, who has worked on the program for 18 months, is convinced that it can.
"When the children from central Honolulu get off the bus and see the pond, they are so surprised. They look around and its all so green. They have never been to a fishpond before. They have never left downtown before and they don't have any other experience in their life to judge it by. It's like they are saying, 'Oh my God, the world can be so beautiful. I didn't know!'"
Mike Markrich is a freelance writer.