Hoʻohaʻaheo: Public School Proud [Sponsored]

Message From The Superintendent

Ideas that transform: To become an incubator of innovative ideas and leadership preparation that transforms all sectors of Hawai‘i.

Welcome to the 2019 – 2020 school year! This year, we will take our core work around equity and excellence to the next level, boosting our cycles of improvement through innovative approaches so we see better outcomes for every student in every school. Our ability to achieve this as a system — in every school, for every child — hinges on working as a fluid, agile learning organization. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been gratified to see many of our schools and offices embracing our three strategies of School Design, Teacher Collaboration, and Student Voice:

Empowering schools to meaningfully design around their communities,
Unleashing the full potential of our educators through powerful collaborative structures and leadership opportunities, and
Listening to students and letting them choose what, where and how they learn.

Hawai‘i is not new to education innovation, and we are primed to lead it. In 1840, King Kamehameha III established Hawai‘i’s public education system, taught in the Hawaiian language, across the Islands. The Hawai‘i State Department of Education (HIDOE) is the oldest such educational system west of the Mississippi. As the only state with two official languages, we’ve done more than any other to expand language immersion learning and assessment, and we are in the vanguard of biliteracy expansion. Our HĀ outcomes capture the unique and enduring values of Hawai‘i’s host culture to be reflected in our students, our system, and our communities.

This long history and foundation infuses our ability to build greater educational equity, excellence and innovation. Our next phase of this work, the 2030 Promise Plan, will be completed this school year to begin implementation in 2020-21. To deliver on our promises to students over the next 10 years, we will build upon the gains we have made over the last several years and innovate to solve persistent challenges, so that students are ready for college, career and community. High-quality public education is the key to a thriving, sustainable Hawai‘i. This requires operational, policy, financial, and community partnership support — all of us, working together. The 2030 Promise Plan will be a tool by which we galvanize stakeholder vision and purpose around public education as a change agent for Hawai‘i.

During this school year, I encourage everyone to learn from our schools through their School Designs. As more of our schools complete this work, we will start to see greater accountability around the unique contributions that every community can make to realize the Hawai‘i we all want — highly educated, innovative, healthy, clean, sustainable, affordable, dynamic, and grounded in HĀ. Every community has a role to play, and every school is a portal to that future.