A faith-based, grass-roots group filed suit Friday against the state Department of Transportation, demanding it make Hawaii’s written driver’s license tests available again in foreign languages.
For the past five years, drivers in Hawaii have been able to take the written test only in English. The class-action suit, filed in U.S. District Court by the Hawaii-based nonprofit Faith Action for Community Equity Hawaii, contends that the restriction discriminates against thousands of immigrants in a state where more than 25 percent of the population speaks a language other than English at home.
It also leaves many who rely on driving to get to work, drop off children at school and navigate other tasks unable to pass the test to get a proper state license — even when those drivers can speak basic English, FACE Hawaii members said at a gathering in front of the state Capitol on Friday.
State transportation officials are working to get the test available in 12 languages other than English by the end of the year or the beginning of 2014, a DOT spokeswoman said. The list includes seven previously available languages (Tagalog, Mandarin, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Samoan and Tongan) and five new ones (Spanish, Marshallese, Chuukese, Ilocano and Hawaiian).
Hawaii stopped offering foreign-language tests in 2008, when the Legislature passed a law that added a question on the exam about the dangers of leaving unattended children in vehicles.
Lawmakers eventually added other questions to the test, too.
“Since that time there was a delay” getting the languages reinstated, but officials have been working toward that goal in the past year, DOT spokeswoman Caroline Sluyter said Friday. She declined to comment on what caused the lengthy delay.
FACE members and their lawyers say they’re glad to hear DOT is working on the issue but that their suit remains necessary to keep up the pressure.
“Imagine not being able to drive until at least Christmas,” said Gavin Thornton, a Honolulu-based Hawaii Appleseed Center for Law and Economic Justice attorney representing plaintiffs in the suit.
“People should be able to go in there and take that test today, and there’s no excuse for them not to be able to have that.”
Hawaii is one of five U.S. states to offer the license test only in English, Thornton said. The activists have been working for the past eight months to get the languages available, said Kim Harman, FACE Hawaii’s policy director. In May a group of Chuukese and Marshallese residents on Maui delivered a petition with more than 300 signatures to the DOT asking for a translated test.
“It feels like they don’t want to talk to us, but we need them to listen,” said Veronica Teico, founder of the Maui Marshallese Women’s Club and a FACE organizer.
