Hawaii voters will have a rare opportunity on Nov. 6, Election Day. They will be able to approve a constitutional amendment that will provide additional state funds for public education. The proposed amendment authorizes the Legislature to establish a surcharge on investment real property. It further provides that these tax revenues will be appropriated by the Legislature to support public education.

The proposed amendment addresses a major persistent problem in public education in Hawaii — underfunding. The most recent comprehensive study on underfunding of the public schools, which was commissioned by the state Board of Education in 2005, found that the state Department of Education would need an additional $278 million per year to provide an “adequate” education to its students. As evident from continuing problems in the schools, such as their large size and increasing operating costs, one can reasonably assume that K-12 public education remains substantially underfunded.

Underfunding has a differential impact on the 180,000 public school students. Indigenous and ethnic minority students, including Native Hawaiians (25 percent), Filipino Americans (22 percent), and smaller numbers of Micronesians, Latinos, and Samoans, constitute 70 percent of those students, according to DOE statistics. As such, they are most educationally disadvantaged by the chronic inadequate funding of the DOE, as evident in Native Hawaiians (15 percent) and Filipino Americans (11 percent) being hugely underrepresented among undergraduates at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Clearly, the quality of the education provided to those students does not foster their enrollment and graduation from the university.

Aware of the funding deficiencies of the public schools, parents with the financial means enroll their children in private schools, resulting in Hawaii having the highest percentage of K-12 private school enrollment (16 percent) in the nation. Greater funding of public education is needed to foster equal educational opportunity in Hawaii.

A study issued in 2016 by the Hawaii State Teachers Association identified some of the most significant problems resulting from insufficient funding. The first is the ongoing teacher shortage, which results in the DOE scrambling each August when the schools open to hire several hundred teachers to fill vacancies. For the past few decades, the DOE has had to recruit teachers from across the continental United States to meet the annual teacher shortfall. While they may be qualified teachers, they generally have had no prior teaching experience in Hawaii with its particular ethnic diversity of students and their culture-based learning styles.

Even after hiring instructors from the continent, the DOE still has a huge shortage of teachers on opening day. It then resorts to hiring college graduates with no teaching education or experience on an emergency-hire basis, who may be asked to teach a subject that is not even related to their major in college.

The persisting teacher shortfall can be directly related to the relatively lower salaries of Hawaii public school teachers, when adjusted for the high cost of living in Hawaii. While their average annual salary is above the national figure, it is about $15,000 to $20,000 less than in school districts with comparable living costs. This discrepancy results in many teachers leaving each year for more lucrative employment and the consequent teacher shortage.

The “Furlough Fridays” lasting 17 days during the 2009-2010 school year clearly demonstrated that public education is not a policy priority of our government officials. On Nov. 6, Hawaii voters will have the opportunity to demonstrate that education is their social justice priority for our children. Please support educational equality by voting yes on the constitutional amendment to increase funding for our public schools.

Jonathan Y. Okamura is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the Universty of Hawaii at Manoa and a member of the Hawai‘i Scholars for Education and Social Justice, which supports passage of the constitutional amendment.