Just about every good thing in life starts with a deep-rooted sense of community, to John Reppun’s way of thinking.

His large extended family is synonymous with the preservation of a sustainable, productive, rural lifestyle on Windward Oahu. Over the generations, the Reppuns have helped prevent commercial development from taking over the Kahaluu-Waikane-Waiahole area, restored water rights to the region, supported small schools and spearheaded programs boosting educational, employment and other opportunities.

Achieving all those goals required the Reppuns to constantly forge broader partnerships with others who had similar goals. So it makes perfect sense that educators from Hawaii and throughout the country who are dedicated to building public-private partnerships would begin their annual conference at the nonprofit Reppun leads, the KEY Project in Waihee.

KEY, which is adjacent to Kahaluu Regional Park, runs educational programs and also serves as a civic center for the community, a role Reppun, who is its executive director, hopes to expand.

Born on Molokai, raised in Kahaluu and educated at the Benjamin Parker Elementary in Kaneohe for his elementary years, Punahou School from seventh grade until graduation in 1970, and Hamilton College in upstate New York, Reppun has long bridged diverse worlds.

Homesick after college, he returned home to try farming with his brothers, became a community activist and joined KEY in the 1980s, initially as a teacher in the alternative learning center the nonprofit ran at the time. He’s been executive director for 10 years now, working alongside a small staff that includes his wife, Lanette Mahelona, the facilities manager.

The KEY Project’s mission is to nurture and promote the cultural, environmental, social, economic and recreational well being of the Kualoa-Heeia community. The goals of the national group Private Schools with Public Purpose are aligned on a much broader scale. The group includes local educators and was inspired in part by Punahou School’s Clarence T.C. Ching PUEO Program (Partnerships in Unlimited Educational Opportunities), which serves public-school students, including many from Kahaluu. The PSPP conference on Oahu March 7-8 seeks to boost opportunities for students in public schools by partnering with private schools and other organizations.

"Bridging those worlds and building those partnerships makes life better for all of us," said Reppun, 61, whose grandfather and father were both family doctors on the Windward side.

One of seven siblings — one girl followed by six boys — Reppun learned early that "we’re all in the same canoe. And by that I don’t mean just my own family, but everyone, the whole community."

QUESTION: It sounds like you had a wonderful childhood, growing up in this part of the island.

ANSWER: It was. We all got to go to public school. And to me that was really important. It was a real gift to be able to go to private school from seventh grade on, but it was an even bigger gift to be part of the public school system first. That was the foundation for our sense of community.  

Most of us attended Benjamin Parker School because my father’s office was in Kaneohe. And it put us right smack in the middle of the culture of Kaneohe, the culture of the Windward side. A mix of Hawaiian families, Okinawan families, families that came from this area who came from small rural family farms. Families of fishermen. Families of the local entrepreneurs. The passion for everything I care so deeply about started right here.

One particular teacher Mrs. Meyers, I still remember her name, she brought culture and the arts into Benjamin Parker in a huge way and the next thing you know the school had a choir and everybody wanted to be in that choir. All of us being able to be in that choir, sharing the sound of our voices, together, l’ll never forget that. It had such a profound affect on me. One voice by itself is one thing; when you put them together, then you become a multitude of voices. All of the sudden you hear something very different. 

Q: It seems like the KEY Project is all about having a place where the community can be together. 

A: Exactly. Benjamin Parker school really was a community gathering place. I remember going to Benjamin Parker during summers.The library was open. The idea that the school was a place to be, even after school and during the summer. The principal, Mr. Shiroma, lived on campus. That was important. If we don’t have people living on our campuses, like the private schools do, and the public schools used to, then the campus goes dead after hours, in many respects. I know there are meetings and so on that take place today, but back then, it was where people lived. So it was more of a family setting back then, than I think that we allow for today. 

Q: So you’d like more public schools to be the heart of their neighborhoods?

A: Right. That’s what we have here in Waihee, with Kahaluu Elementary School and the Kahaluu Regional Park and the KEY Project close together. They’re all part of what we see as the civic center. 

I think some schools still strive to capture that kind of atmosphere, and we need to encourage that and accentuate that. I think that’s pretty important. When you have a school that is alive during those non-school hours, during intersessions and summers, for other purposes, it also makes it possible to be intergenerational.  

Q: Your family is synonymous with preserving water rights in Waikane-Waiahole. Your brothers Paul and Charlie are taro farmers, icons of the sustainability movement in Hawaii. You talked about growing up together and being close. Are you still? 

A: Yes. If you’re going to design a family, make sure it’s not an even number. Just like on the City Council, you want an odd number, so you never break even and end in a deadlock. The alliances constantly shifted as we were growing up (laughter), but because it was an odd number, it kind of kept the wheel turning. 

I would say that our attitudes and our concerns about the socioeconomic surroundings that we have, we share pretty deeply. Those come very much from mom and dad’s involvement. Both of them were very involved in the community. There was no such thing as just hanging back and watching the world go by in our family. Growing up, we were surrounded by mentors, heroes, left and right. They were regular people. They were the doctors, they were the activists, they were the people who stuck to their guns. That’s what communities need to be all about. I hope that kids today growing up can find those mentors, those local heroes, those people to model their own aspirations after. Those who help to inspire them to dream and dream big.

Q: That kinds of leads me into to this event coming, Private Schools with Public Purpose. The conference starts here, and then moves to Punahou and Iolani School.

A: This conference will bring together public and private educators, nonprofits, all sorts of people. I think inevitably it will bring some folks together who are interested in community planning. That’s really, really important. You can’t think about schools in a vacuum. Everybody from all different realms needs to be talking to one another. So it’s very appropriate that we’re coming together at a community center first. 

Q: So it doesn’t matter if it’s a private school or a public one? A charter school? Even a home school?

A: Right. It’s really important for us to build those bridges, so that children, no matter where they go to school, have a sense of the larger community we all belong to. Those bridges are being built and now we have to cross them on a routine basis. We’re going to survive or not depending on how well we work together.  

Tuck Newport (who graduated high school in 1967, three years before Reppun) was a hero of mine growing up. He wrote for the Hawaii Observer newspaper in the 1970s. He used to talk about how here in Hawaii we have this pretty unique opportunity to see the results of our own footprint. We live in short watersheds. What happens up mauka, we see down makai in the rivers, and the bays and ocean. If you live in Ohio or Illinois, what do you really know about what’s happening downstream in the Gulf of Mexico? Obviously, this is true when we’re talking about environmental issues, land use, that sort of thing, but it’s also true when we’re talking about people. It’s true in education. PSPP gets at that idea. Private and public purpose are really one and the same. It’s about our rights and responsibilities as human citizens. 

Q: You’ve been involved in education issues for a long time, especially in the Castle complex?

A: Yes. We’re very aware at KEY of some of the serious needs. We’ve been involved in the (Castle Complex Redesign Initiative). In the Castle complex, like in other areas, if you don’t make adequate yearly progress, you run the risk of the feds stepping in and saying we’re going to take over. So to get ahead of that, the redesign effort is underway, involving the whole community. And that effort very quickly showed the whole community that we’re losing a quarter of the students from ninth grade to 12th grade. They just don’t graduate.

Q: They’re dropping out? 

A: They don’t make it to graduation, for whatever reason. But that doesn’t mean they leave our community. We’re just dumping our failure to educate our children right back into the very same community. 

So we have too many young people who are not prepared for employment, for moving on to higher education; they don’t have the opportunity, don’t have the skills. They’re still our concern. They might fall out of the high school’s jurisdiction, but they’re still part of our community. 

Q: KEY has programs for them?

A: Yes. Not just us, of course. I’m not going to say we’re even making a dent. But clearly our responsibility as we move forward is to embrace that challenge. We have two particular programs going on right now that we really need to build. Our Project Holomua on the front end, prevention, working with kids who are coming from fifth- and sixth-grade moving into the middle school experience, trying to help them succeed in high school. That’s one of the things PUEO does too. Our Project Hoohuli is about picking up the pieces later (for people who don’t make it through high school), so they get a diploma, get training they need. We by no means have any particular expertise in those realms. We’re trying to learn, and do everything we can to help. 

Q: Providing alternatives?

A: Right. We need to look at education not just as taking place on school campuses, but taking place throughout the entire community, at all kinds of sites. My brothers at their farm (Waianu Farm in Waiahole) take through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of students every year, from public and private schools. They’re a classroom. They’re a resource. It’s time for us to map where education is taking place. Education is not solely the responsibility of the state Department of Education or of the private schools. I think that’s one of the things this conference can bring about, bringing people and resources together to address the state of our canoe.