Lanai’s sole school faces chronic issue of teacher turnover

The teacher turnover rate at Lanai High and Elementary School climbed to what may be an all-time high this fall, forcing the principal and vice principals, even the athletic director, to help teach elementary grades and math classes.

The school — the only one serving the rural island — started the academic year in August with 11 vacancies, meaning one in four teaching positions was unfilled. Friday marked the end of the first quarter, and Principal Elton Kinoshita has only been able to fill six of the openings, including two just last week.

Some parents are outraged that administrators and multiple substitutes who don’t hold teaching credentials have been instructing their children for more than two months. At least one family has pulled its children from the school over the lack of permanent and qualified teachers, while others are contemplating better educational opportunities off-island.

"As parents, we feel so powerless," said Lanai resident Natalie Ropa, whose son, Jake, is in first grade. "This is an ongoing problem, and it’s like we’re basically told we’re just stuck with a bad system. It’s really sad because the kids are the ones who aren’t getting the education they deserve."

The school lost the 11 positions due to a combination of retirements, transfers to public schools on other islands, and relocations back to the mainland.

The outstanding vacancies are for a Hawaiian immersion teacher, two elementary special education teachers, and a second- and third-grade teacher. Kinoshita has made job offers for the special education positions, but will be returning the per-pupil funding for two of the other vacant positions in part because overall enrollment has dropped by about 20 students.

Kinoshita, who oversees the school’s 580 students in grades pre-kindergarten to 12, joined Lanai High and Elementary last September after 13 years as an administrator at Campbell High School, where the 3,000-plus student body outnumbers the entire population of Lanai.

"Not everyone wants to come to the island," said Kinoshita, whose father was born and raised on Lanai.

The former pineapple plantation has one community hospital, one school, one gas station and no traffic lights. The price of isolation is on display at the island’s two grocery/general stores, where a half-gallon of milk was recently selling for $9.

"It really stresses how remote you are when you lose teachers to Kauai because it’s considered more happening than here. You give up a lot when you come to the island," Kinoshita said.

While turnover at the Lanai school — and many of the state’s rural schools — has been a longstanding challenge, Kinoshita said it’s been increasingly harder to find qualified teachers who are willing to move to Lanai.

"Sometimes people wouldn’t even get off the plane. They’d see all that red dirt and just go into shock," said Laurie Cicotello, who taught a year of high school English at the school in 2000-2001 before moving back to Nebraska. "Even in the best of circumstances, people come and go constantly."

Parents of the school’s first-grade class have been especially vocal about the situation. The school last week recruited a licensed teacher from the mainland with more than 20 years of experience to teach first grade.

"I realize I live in a very rural area, but for the first two weeks of school we basically had the vice principal as the teacher, which was not successful. Then we had a full-time substitute, and we just got a teacher, a certified teacher, on Tuesday," Lanai resident Jenna Majkus said of her daughter Mia’s first-grade class.

"It just hasn’t been a positive experience. It’s been heartbreaking," Majkus said. "To have to wait nine weeks for a certified teacher is unacceptable. Our kids deserve better. There’s some very good teachers here; they deserve better, too."

She said her family is exploring other schooling options in the event the situation doesn’t improve, including the possibility of enrolling at a public charter school satellite site or relocating.

"I’ve lived here almost 20 years. My daughter’s education is a high priority. That’s something my family has to really look at," she said.

Research studies have underscored the critical role teachers play in student learning and achievement.

One University of Tennessee study found that elementary students who were placed with effective teachers for three years in a row scored on average 52 percentile points higher on standardized tests than comparable students who were placed with low-performing teachers for three years in a row.

The study also showed that learning gains realized by students during a year with an effective teacher were sustained in later years while the negative effects of weak teachers persisted in later years.

Besides the rural lifestyle, Kinoshita said the starting salary for teachers has been a big deterrent. The current Hawaii State Teachers Association contract calls for a $45,159 starting salary for licensed teachers. But a degree in education is required.

"Unless you’ve gone through an education program and have a degree in education, you don’t come in at the teacher salary,"Kinoshita said. "For example, if you have a master’s (degree) in math, you would come in at $33,000 because you’re considered an instructor. Unless your track was education with a math background, you wouldn’t start at the $45,000."

The HSTAcontract does award bonuses for hard-to-staff schools, which includes Lanai. Licensed teachers are entitled to a $1,500 bonus for each year of employment at these schools.

The island’s tight housing market had also been an obstacle for teachers, but Kinoshita said billionaire Larry Ellison, who bought 98 percent of Lanai two years ago and oversees the island through management firm Pulama Lana’i, has been supplying a pool of subsidized rentals for teachers. He said Pulama Lana’i also is donating money for professional development for teachers as well as travel and lodging costs for student projects and competitions.

Department of Education spokeswoman Donalyn Dela Cruz said beefed up recruitment efforts for the Lanai positions haven’t produced results.

She said the department has had to hire individuals who are working toward a teaching degree because of the lack of qualified applicants. These hires are eligible to work for up to three years as long as they are actively seeking an education degree and teaching license. (One of the Lanai vacancies was created because an instructor didn’t get his license in time.)

Dela Cruz said the DOE also has approached Teach For America to help with the vacancies on Lanai. The nonprofit recruits recent college graduates to teach for two years in low-income communities throughout the country.

HSTA Vice President Joan Lewis said recruiting mainland hires and new college graduates for rural schools is a Band-Aid approach that doesn’t address the problem long-term.

"That’s how you wind up with 11 empty classrooms on an island that has never had it that bad," Lewis said. "We’ve got to get serious. Lanai has unique issues. If we want to make sure we hold to the promise of high-quality education for every student, these short-term fixes are not going to work."

She said the union wants to attract local teachers to serve these communities.

"We need to try to identify folks who want to stay on Lanai ultimately, and that may mean scholarships for them to get their degrees and connect it to them coming back to teach,"Lewis said. "We need a different approach to ensure teachers get the support they need on that island, and that includes compensation, too, obviously."

Ropa, the mom of a first-grader, said she’s started taking education courses through the University of Hawaii-Maui College’s distance-learning center on Lanai, where she works as a project associate.

"I’m in college because I want to become a teacher,"Ropa said. "I wasn’t born and raised on Lanai; I’m from Molokai. But this is going to be our community, and we need to have homegrown teachers to help create longevity for the school."