Ige uses Board of Education to get rid of superintendent

It is becoming apparent that Gov. David Ige will not be holding Kathryn Matayoshi Day at Washington Place anytime soon.

The superintendent of education was not too gracefully shown the state’s exit door last week in a Board of Education news release titled “Board considers initiating superintendent search.”

According to the release: “This proposed action is being initiated in anticipation of the ending of the contract term of current Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi.”

Although the release comes from the BOE, it actually should be from Ige, who has stocked the board with his old campaign buddies.

The BOE chairman, Lance Mizumoto, who besides also being chairman of Central Pacific Bank, is a Pearl City High School chum of Ige’s.

In a MidWeek interview last year, Mizumoto recalled that it was first lady Dawn Amano-Ige who offered him a slot on the school board. He described seeing Ige and his wife jogging downtown and stopped to chat.

“I knew something was up, and after a few pleasantries, Dawn said, ‘Let me get to the point. We want you on the Board of Education,’” Mizumoto said.

Also named by Ige to the school board is Hubert Minn, a former BOE chairman, who was grassroots coordinator for Ige’s 2014 gubernatorial campaign and in charge of sign-holding and yard signs.

Also, newly named BOE member Darrel Galera was an early Ige supporter and campaign contributor. It was Galera who co-authored a controversial survey that found many public school principals complaining about a lack of support from the Matayoshi-led Department of Education.

“You would need to have leadership that embraces the idea that you have to change the system. You have to empower schools. You have to empower principals, parents and students so that change will happen,” Galera said in a 2014 call for Matayoshi to be removed.

So Matayoshi’s defenestration has actually been a long time coming.

At the same time, the BOE-Ige co-op has been inhospitable to those who are not on the bus.

Jim Williams, one of the original members appointed to the Board of Education in 2011, quit earlier this year because of Ige’s meddling.

“Your lack of faith in and support of the board have sapped my enthusiasm to the point where I no longer can continue to serve,” Williams wrote in his resignation letter.

The issue may seem minor, but it is key to understanding Hawaii’s current educational crisis. It is not that Ige will not be able to cool the 1,000 classrooms he promised to by December, or the low pay for public school teachers or the lack of adequate classroom space across the state — it is because the DOE and Ige have embarked on two different plans to reform the nation’s only statewide school system.

The federal plan is called the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA.

The DOE has been planning its reforms for several years; Ige’s plan just came about this year. The DOE was stunned when Ige announced his plan and Williams quit the BOE because the state Constitution says the school board, not the governor, sets education policy.

In a short news release from his office about Matayoshi’s departure, Ige said: “We have an opportunity to move to a more school-initiated, innovative approach to education.”

What Ige has done is find the other way to skin that cat. If he wants to run the schools, he is going to do it through running the Board of Education and disposing of the superintendent of education — and he should just say so.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.