Private school to be Weeds and gravel now cover the 3-acre lot in downtown Kapolei, but Bernadette Axelrod sees her 5-year-old daughter's future unfolding on the spot, starting next September.
built in Kapolei
The Canadian builder plans to have
the school ready next fallBy Susan Essoyan
sessoyan@starbulletin.com"It is a leap of faith," she said with a smile. "But I'm hoping it will be a rip-roaring success and turn out to be the Leeward side's Punahou some day."
Axelrod was one of 350 people who jammed a meeting last week for parents interested in Island Pacific Academy. The school was billed as the first private, nondenominational college preparatory school in West Oahu.
It is the boldest venture yet for Academex Systems Inc., a Canadian company that has opened three small schools in British Columbia since 1999. All those schools started in temporary, leased facilities, and the largest, Southpointe Academy, is still based in a shopping mall.
In Hawaii, however, the educational consulting corporation is ready to spend $5 million up front on the school, according to Larry Caster, chief executive officer of Academex (Hawaii).
"Many schools start small, and when they reach critical mass, they build a new facility," said Caster, formerly sales and leasing manager for Campbell Estate. "We feel so strongly about Kapolei and the families here and their needs that we feel there is sufficient demand to make that commitment now."
Academex plans to break ground next month for a 25,000-square-foot, two-story building which will house pre-kindergarten through seventh grade. A second phase, extending through 12th grade, would follow a few years later.
The school intends to follow the International Baccalaureate World School curriculum, the same one used by Mid-Pacific Institute in Manoa, according to Principal Daniel White, former headmaster of Seabury Hall on Maui and the Sacramento Country Day School in California.
Dramatic growth in West Oahu's population and high family incomes in Kapolei make the area ripe for its own private school, Caster said. Cane fields have given way to a thriving community whose major gripe is fighting traffic into town.
"This will take the tremendous hurdle of the long commute away," said Axelrod, who lives in Maili. "We don't want to have to drag our 5-year-old child into the car at 5:45 in the morning. We'd like to have our dinner at the table and our breakfast at the table, and not on our laps in the car. "I tried so hard to find a school out on this side, but the choices are so limited."
Axelrod had hoped her daughter, Ella, could stay at Seagull Schools in Kapolei, a preschool program that considered expanding to the fifth grade. But Seagull decided to stop at first grade for lack of space, according to Chuck Larson, Seagull's executive director.
Larson said Seagull had operated an elementary school on the Windward side, but "not once in 18 years did it ever break even financially." Private schools are often subsidized by a church or an endowment, he noted, making the Academex proposal remarkable. "This is very ambitious," he said. "I wish them well. I think the community deserves a private school so parents have a choice."
Robert Witt, executive director of the Hawaii Association of Independent Schools, said private school enrollment statewide has been relatively stable over the last decade, at roughly 32,000 to 33,000 students. "It is daunting to start a new school," he said. "Most efforts don't get beyond the planning stages. The fact that you have Larry Caster and Dan White working on this together lends a huge amount of credibility to the project because they both are very good at what they do."
Like its Canadian cousins, the school will hold down expenses by relying on facilities like the 73-acre Kapolei Regional Park, rather than covering the cost of infrastructure, such as a gymnasium and athletic fields.
"We will concentrate on sailing, golf, cross country, soccer -- sports that we can support," Caster said. "Many of those are for higher grades, and we've got time to develop them."
Although its schools are all nonprofit, Academex is a for-profit company financed by long-term investors, and will fund the school with equity financing through its subsidiary, Venturex Global, Caster said. The company, which is based in Richmond, British Columbia, has no plans to use the tax-exempt bond financing approved by Hawaii voters, because that system has not yet been set up, he said. Academex's schools have grown quickly. Central Okanagan Academy, near Spokane, Wash., opened in 1999 to 28 students and now has 232 students from preschool through grade 9, according to Jonathan Derksen, head of the school.
Southpointe was launched in 2000 in Tsawwassen, south of Vancouver, and has 315 students in grades preschool through grade 10, Headmaster Andrew Wallace said. Academex's third campus, Seymour Academy, opened last year and has nearly 100 students.
Island Pacific Academy, which anticipates capping enrollment at 600 once its high school is built, is getting a strong response from the 70,000 fliers it sent to residents of Kapolei, Pearl City, Waikele Mililani and Waianae.
"We are swamped with phone calls," said Judith White, director of admissions and wife of the principal.
The school is distributing applications and will begin hiring staff early next year, Daniel White said. It expects to have a 20-1 student-teacher ratio, he said. Annual tuition will be $6,000 for pre-kindergarten, $7,400 for kindergarten through fifth grade and $8,400 for sixth and seventh grades.
"The curriculum will have a lot in common with the top private schools in Honolulu, in terms of emphasizing language arts, the use of math for critical thinking, scientific inquiry and including arts as core courses, not as an afterthought," he said.
