DOE should already be tracking students

The state Department of Education’s proposal for a "student watch list" program is certainly commendable but a bureaucratic waste of time.

In every school, aren’t the counselors supposed to be doing precisely what the DOE is proposing? Just what is occurring in those schools that the DOE must come up with something that should already have been done every year in the schools?

The counselors definitely should already know which students are potentially alienated — e.g., failing grades, absences, student academic or behavior referrals — and are identified for placement in special motivation classes, or in the high schools, the Alternative Learning Centers for students who are alienated or potentially alienated from school.

Students with excessive absences should already have been identified and services rendered to them before referral to Family Court.

Randall Ng
Kapahulu

Ho‘opili plans meet sustainability goals

As a member of the Ho‘opili Community Task Force, I had the opportunity to work directly with D.R. Horton-Schuler Homes, with its planning of a new kind of community that integrates residential, commercial, agricultural, education and recreational spaces within East Kapolei.

Our task force team is a diverse group, consisting of many new and seasoned residents from Ewa, Kapolei and Waipahu. Because of its location, Ho‘opili connects our communities and, as the name suggest, allows us to "come together."

The process has involved education in planning principles, around smart growth and transit-oriented development. More important, it gave us the chance to share our thoughts on creating a vibrant and safe community, a place where residents would share a sense of connection.

After several years of working together, the task force has established the following core values to help guide the overall design of Ho‘opili: Create a community that is connected; provide an enhanced lifestyle; and promote sustainable initiatives.

Rich Hargrave
Ho‘opili Community Task Force

Hawaii ag lands need to be saved

Germany, like Hawaii, has limited land, but it puts its agricultural land in perpetuity. If more urban expansion is needed, the cities must go up: high-rises.

Flying over Germany, one sees this — concentrated cities, but large rural areas for growing crops.

How Hawaii’s land-use commissioners, whose duty is to look after the land, in one fell swoop sold out our best agricultural land on Oahu to mainland outfits to build housing in an area that already has the worst gridlock traffic in the nation is absolutely unconscionable, unscrupulous, devastating!

Please, please, someone do something for the aina and not mainland profits.

Anneliese Chun
Kailua

Land rulings reflect our moral outlook

Decisions about land use provide a moral barometer for our state and community.

Recent decisions about housing developments in Mililani and the Ewaplain raise critical questions about the values that guide decisions.

A similar issue is being considered about land in Haleiwa.

Will making money continue as the driving principle behind these decisions, or will sustainability become a more important moral virtue?

In the mid-1970s, I was doing research on land development in Hawaii for a post-graduate degree and was first introduced to this question. Agricultural land in Kalama Valley was being converted fora housing development and there were similar issues along the WaianaeCoast.

Then, as now, local residents and environmentalists favored conservation and sustainability while developers and the state Land Use Commission favored wealth and their concept of progress; little has changed.

A moral blight has settled upon the land of aloha.

John Heidel
Kailua

Rail promises to be fiscal black hole

John Maynard Keynes, famous liberal-left and demand-side economist, once analogized his recipe for spurring growth and ending unemployment as having the government bury money followed by the leasing of digging rights to private companies.

Allegorically, Honolulu’s mass transit system does Keynes one better, namely it plans to dig holes and pay public employees to forever maintain them.

The U.S. House Appropriations Committee, which recently cut 60 percent from Honolulu’s latest request for funds, should have cut 100 percent — so that the city would finally wake up to the reality that the train is little more than a perpetual fiscal black hole.

If Mayor Peter Carlisle doesn’t wise up immediately, more and more of his one-time supporters will soon be holding their noses and voting for Ben Cayetano.

Michael P. Rethman
Kaneohe

Forget oil, tap into Hawaii’s volcanoes

The volcanos belong to the state of Hawaii, right?

We need billions to fix the infrastructure, right?

Yet we continue to send those very same billions out of state over and over again, year after year, to buy oil. And this at a time when we have all the energy we need right here in Hawaii.

There is enough energy in our biggest volcano to power the entire state forever and have plenty left over. The concept is proven and demonstrated, beyond any question. And it is there for all of us. So what are we waiting for?

This is not a question of waiting for private enterprise to overcome the immense legal and political roadblocks. This is a question of common sense.

The Legislature should bust a gut and enact enabling legislation now.

Bill Miller
Pearl City