Three longtime members of the Charter School Review Panel — Chairman Carl Takamura, former Chairwoman Ruth Tschumy and Pualani Akaka — resigned Thursday to protest the state Board of Education’s reversal of the panel’s decisions on converting Laupahoehoe School to a charter school.

At a panel meeting, they said the board had disregarded their work and that they saw no point in continuing to serve.

"You now have ordered that Laupahoehoe be allowed to open its doors (as a charter) in 2012-13 without a Local School Board in place, yet you accept no responsibility for what happens at the school after your intervention," Tschumy wrote in her letter of resignation. "In essence, you have left the panel with all its previous responsibilities, but you’ve taken away much of its authority."

The 12-member panel already had one vacancy, so the resignations leave it with just eight members. Seven votes are required for action by the volunteer panel, which oversees Hawaii’s semiautonomous charter schools.

Laupahoehoe High and Elementary, founded in 1883 and located midway between Hilo and Honokaa, has just 236 students enrolled in kindergarten through grade 12. The push to convert it to a charter gained steam in 2009 when the rural campus was put on the list for possible closing. A vote taken in February 2010 by school staff and parents, supervised by the League of Women Voters, was 145-35 in favor of conversion.

But as the threat of its shuttering receded and concerns emerged about the charter, sentiment swung in the other direction. By the time the panel voted on the charter application in May 2011, it had heard impassioned pleas from the majority of teachers, the principal and many staff, students and parents to keep it a regular public school.

The panel denied the application, citing community opposition and questions about whether the charter would be financially viable.

On appeal, the Board of Education reversed that ruling and awarded the charter. Twenty out of 21 teachers then petitioned the board to be allowed to transfer to other campuses. After the charter applicants refused to allow school stakeholders to vote for a governing board, the panel delayed the charter’s opening by a year, but the board overruled that decision as well.

"Is it fair that a small group of people can come into a community and take the school away?" Tschumy asked Thursday. "Is it fair that major stakeholders, the parents, the students, the teachers, do not have a say in this?"

The panel’s frustration was evident when Jim Williams, who serves both on the Board of Education and as a member of the charter panel, put forth a motion Thursday to accept the board’s decision and rescind the panel’s previous actions on Laupahoehoe. It failed for lack of a second.

Williams told panel members that the board is not supposed to simply be a rubber stamp for the panel. In two other recent appeals, he pointed out, the board upheld the panel’s decision in one case and remanded the issue to the panel in another.

"This is very specific to a certain case," Williams said. "There’s been two reversals, and they’ve both related to Laupahoehoe."

Akaka, a panel member since its inception in 2007 and a nationally certified teacher, said she was fully involved in the conversion of her own school, Kualapuu School on Molokai, from a traditional public school to a charter school. The shift required support from all members of the school community, she said.

"This is not the case in Laupahoehoe," Akaka said, her voice shaking with emotion. "The BOE and the interim school board may have followed the letter of the law but destroyed the school community."

Added Takamura, "The whole life of that community revolves around that school. To see what’s happening now is really sad."

"With a conversion charter school, the bar is even higher because it is the existing community school," he added. "It is not just a building; there are people there. The bar is higher in making sure if you are going to convert and form a charter school, that those people are coming with you."

Contacted after the panel meeting, Board of Education Vice Chairman Brian De Lima, who presided over the latest hearing on the Laupahoehoe appeal, said he regretted the resignations but not the board’s decisions.

"I really believe they had their heart in the right place," De Lima said, but panel members "completely ignored the only secret ballot vote that occurred in February 2010." He noted that the applicants had won a $450,000 competitive federal grant. And he said their decision to postpone stakeholder elections until after the charter opened was consistent with their original intent and the law.

"I think the Board of Education had to do what it had to do because it was the law," De Lima said. "And if we ignored the issue, it would have been more controversy for a longer period of time, and that wouldn’t serve any constituency — the parents, the students, staff or teachers at all."

"There was no agenda," he said. "We were just doing what the law requires and bringing this controversy to an end. We’re all volunteers. We try to do the right thing."

Board of Education Chairman Don Horner expressed his respect for the three members and their dedication to public education. He said the board would move "to appoint new members, equally well qualified."

"The challenge is the current governance for charter schools structure is ambiguous," Horner said, adding that he hopes a proposed revamping of the charter law will change that. "In my judgment this will alleviate some of the ambiguity and provide the structure we need in order to move forward."