Spotlight on
Radford buoys hope
for more funding

Radford rated "C" for facilities

By Terrence Lee
Star-Bulletin

Supporters of Radford High School hope help will be on the way.

The Senate Education and Intergovernmental Affairs committees yesterday passed a resolution urging the state to use federal impact aid funds to supplement state Department of Education funding.

When the department receives the federal funds, the state reduces that amount from the state treasury given to the department.

Federal impact aid is paid to the state as compensation for educating "federally connected" students, such as military children.

Eighty percent of Radford's students are military dependents, and district state Rep. Bob McDermott (R, Foster Village), said the school's deteriorating condition has not been fixed because many of the parents there don't vote in Hawaii.

Lobbyist John Radcliffe, whose wife, Diane Radcliffe, teaches at Radford, said the resolution will be meaningless unless a provision echoing the resolution's intent is inserted into the state budget bill. "There's no benefit from these impact aid funds at all," he said. "Everything stays the same."

"In Hawaii we have this extraordinary, highly centralized executive apparatus in which the executive branch controls the budget to a much greater extent than in any other state," Radcliffe said. "It's simply bad policy to do this."

Radford supporters want the federal funds used for school repairs.

Last month, they told the Board of Education of the school's deteriorating conditions, including fire hazards, improper storage of chemicals, structural damage and walls that looked about ready to collapse.

"I'm ashamed to have to ask for water fountains for my kids," said Jan Catton, who documented the school's problems on video.

Catton told the Senate panel the Radford example stresses the need for more school funding. "It will give hope to those students, teachers and administrators alike, who are struggling to learn, teach and model excellence in incredibly difficult conditions,"

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C grade for
Radford facilities

By Mary Adamski
Star-Bulletin

A community inspection team rated Radford High School's facilities at a midway point between unacceptably decrepit and perfect, the Board of Education was told.

The rating of 12, on a scale of 6 to 18, was assessed in the annual school inspection program by volunteers, said Al Suga, assistant superintendent of business services.

"It is a safe school," Suga said in a report to the board yesterday. He said the Department of Accounting and General Services found no unsafe structural damage at the west Honolulu school.

The board has called for reports on the condition of the school since a group of parents dramatized the dilapidated state of the campus by showing a video of termite damage, holes in walls and dangling pipes at a March board meeting.

Radford Principal Robert Stevens told board members that athletes' uniforms are being stored in a Matson container because "termites ate the uniforms and the lockers."

"We are embarrassed by the housekeeping situation," he said. "We have addressed most of them," he said of the problems pinpointed by the parents.

The complaining parents are in the military. Some 80 percent of the Radford student body is military dependents and 30 percent leaves in any given year.

Stevens told the board he wanted to lay to rest "the perception that there is a rift between the high school and the U.S. military. The military is the greatest resource we have. We need them, we really do."

He said one of the complainants and her husband, an Air Force colonel, came to the campus with a force of 50 students and painted seven wings of the high school.

Electricians from Hickam Air Force Base did wiring. "Other schools pay $1 million for wiring, we got it for a lot less," Stevens said.

"I respect that all they want is what is best for their students." He said military families come from "schools where they have swimming pools, a gymnasium, air-conditioning . . . this is what they are used to."