Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
Board of With costs for special education mounting, the budget for the next two years being prepared and teachers considering a strike, the nine incoming members of the Board of Education took their oaths of office yesterday.
Education members
are sworn in
A new two-year budget,
Teachers likely to need mediator
special education and a
looming teachers strike
top their agendaBy Crystal Kua
Star-BulletinVice Chairwoman Karen Knudsen called it "a truly historic event" -- the largest incoming class of elected board members.
"We have so many new members we are welcoming aboard, we have former members who are being re-elected, and we have current members who are continuing. This is a great day for the people of Hawaii," Knudsen said.
Sworn in yesterday at the state Supreme Court building were Lex Brodie, Carol Gabbard, Sherwood Hara, Marilyn A. Harris, Donna Ikeda, Denise Matsumoto, Michael Nakamura, Meyer Ueoka and Herbert Watanabe.
Watanabe, Brodie and Matsumoto won re-election; Ueoka and Nakamura were elected after they were appointed to their respective seats; Hara was on the board previously in the 1980s; and while Ikeda is a former state senator, she, Gabbard and Harris are first-time board members.
Their first meeting as a new board will be tomorrow at Baldwin High School on Maui.
A new chairman will be selected at that meeting. Watanabe and Winston Sakurai, who was not up for re-election this year, are running for the top spot.
"If they feel that I am the one to lead, then I will be grateful to serve," Watanabe said.
"Whoever gets elected chair will do a good job," Sakurai said.
Both Sakurai and Watanabe said that the new board's greatest challenge will be formulating the Department of Education's biennium budget while looking at the increasing costs of complying with a federal mandate to improve services to special-needs students.
The budget scenario would likely include any raise given to teachers by the state.
Yesterday's ceremony follows a tumultuous campaign season during which the board was split over whether to add sexual orientation to a list of student characteristics protected against harassment.
One of the more controversial campaigns was that of Gabbard because her previous political involvement included helping her husband, Mike, defeat same-sex marriages in Hawaii. Protesters who support gay rights and disapprove of Gabbard were present before yesterday's ceremony.
But wearing a smile and many fragrant leis, Gabbard said she hopes the public -- especially the media and her critics -- will be able to look beyond the campaign and allow her to do her job to help Hawaii's schoolchildren and teachers.
"I just look forward to learning what goes on and what I can do as a board member, and working with other members of the board to make some positive changes for our kids and our teachers," Gabbard said.
A notice of impasse was issued today by the Hawaii Labor Relations Board in negotiations between the state and the Hawaii State Teachers Association. Mediator will likely
be needed to avert
strike by teachersStar-Bulletin staff
The board has three days to appoint a mediator for 15 days of mediation to try to break the logjam in talks.
Money is the only issue: The state is offering no raise in the first two years of a proposed four-year contract and a 9 percent raise over the last two years. The HSTA has asked for 22 percent over four years.
This morning, Gov. Ben Cayetano said he is worried that the increasingly strident rhetoric of the public worker unions could lead to a strike next year.
Cayetano said the state has opened its financial accounts to the unions to show how much money it has.
He said union leaders are pushing for larger pay raises than the state can afford.
"They are raising expectations and ramping up the rhetoric," Cayetano said.
"It is going to take a great deal of leadership on the part of the union leaders to explain it," he said.
HSTA chief negotiator Joan Husted said a 9 percent increase in the second two years of the contract will not keep teachers from going to other states with higher salaries and benefits.
"If it becomes necessary to get the kinds of improvement in teachers' salaries we need to have happen, a strike is always a possibility," Husted said. "We'd like to settle. The teachers would like to get about the business of educating the kids."