[ OUR OPINION ]

Hawaii’s schools
fairly safe but
can improve

THE ISSUE Records indicate that violence in Hawaii's public schools has stabilized at a low level since the mid-1990s.

MORE than four years have passed since two social outcasts opened fire on their classmates at Columbine High School on the outskirts of Denver, but school officials nationwide remain on the lookout for eruptions of violence. A federal law that takes effect next month will allow students to transfer from "persistently dangerous" schools to safer ones. Hawaii parents and students can feel somewhat secure in the knowledge that no school in the state fits the federal criteria for persistent danger.

STAR-BULLETIN Hawaii education expert Mary Ann Raywid says smaller schools are safer.

"We're not even close in any area," Kendyl Ko, education specialist for the Safe and Drug Free Schools program, told the Star-Bulletin's Susan Essoyan. Under the proposed definition for "persistently dangerous," a school must have had at least 1 percent of the student body suspended for at least 92 days for firearms violations or for violent crimes. No Hawaii public school has reported more than two-tenths of 1 percent of the student body were suspended for more than three months.

Violence in Hawaii's schools actually has decreased significantly from the 1995-'96 school year, when there were nearly 20 suspensions for every 1,000 students for assault, extortion or robbery, harassment, sexual offenses, terroristic threatening or firearms violations. The rate has hovered around 15 suspensions per 1,000 students since the 1998-'99 school year.

After the Columbine shooting, many school administrators in the country began targeting outcasts as potential threats, imposing inappropriate and even unconstitutional sanctions. Teachers and school counselors were wiser to reach out to nurture tolerance in all students and understanding for those who feel shunned by classmates.

That becomes more difficult with the increased size of the school. Studies have shown that larger school size results in higher levels of violence and disorder, student alienation and teacher dissatisfaction. As Hawaii education experts Mary Ann Raywid and Libby Oshiyama noted in an essay published in the Star-Bulletin three years ago, schools should be small enough for students and teachers to know one other, for individuals to be missed when they are absent and for participation by all students.

"If I could do one single thing (to reduce violence among juveniles)," James Garbarino of Cornell University, a top scholar on juvenile delinquency, has said, "it would be to ensure that teenagers are not in high schools bigger than 400 to 500 students."

Most of Honolulu's high schools are triple or quadruple that size, and the state cannot afford to build more schools to attain that ideal level of enrollment. However, education officials could organize students into smaller units within each school to increase their familiarity with one another. Meanwhile, teachers should instruct students on what one educator calls the four Rs: mutual "respect," "reciprocity" among students and between them and adults, "responsibility" to self and the greater community, and "reverence" for place and its connections.