Island Pacific Academy among 3 winners of a national song contest

Island Pacific Academy became one of three national winners in the Rock Your School Song contest with its imaginative blend of ukulele and chant, Hawaiian percussion with hints of Jawaiian rhythms, and the camera-friendly performances of several talented teens.

The school will receive its Grammy Signature Schools Community Award and $2,500 for its music program Friday at its campus in Kapolei.

The contest, co-sponsored by the Grammy Foundation and Jostens, challenged high schools to "rock their school song" in a music video. Judging criteria included how well the video expressed students’ school pride, the quality of the music performance and the editing of the finished video.

The biggest challenge the music club had to deal with was that Island Pacific Academy is a single school with classes from junior kindergarten through 12th grade. How could the entire school participate?

"It was a little more difficult because it was to show your schoolwide community, and most of the people entering in the contest are just high schools, but the contest was more to reinvent your school song in a more modern style," music club adviser Micah Hiro­kawa said. "I thought that being from Hawaii we have something that’s unique — Hawaiian music — and I thought we’d give it an island flare."

The video opens with kumu Momi Kuahiwinui leading kids in pre-K through fifth grade in the school oli (chant). It ends with sixth- through eighth-graders singing the school song. Several older students, representing grades nine through 12, tie those two segments together with individual performances: Hunter Sorensen is seen playing ukulele; Caitlin Kucic, Jake Yeager, Maddie Yamamura and Robbie Roy sing while dancing backward through different parts of the campus; Giovanni de Lugo leads a larger group through a Jawaiian/ hip-hop performance.

Sorenson, an 11th-grader, has been playing ukulele for about five years; he also plays piano and guitar. He and Kucic, who is also in the 11th grade, are members of the music club and its in-house recording arm, Navigator Records.

Yamamura, a ninth-grader, has been playing piano since she was 8 and has been doing theater at the school almost that long; senior Roy plays guitar and has experience singing here and in the Philippines.

"Mr. Hirokawa specifically picked out certain students that he felt were best suited for said positions in the song, and we just kind of rolled with it," Roy said.

Hirokawa confessed that even after the school made the initial cut and was announced as one of 20 nationwide finalists, he wasn’t expecting to win. When he got an email April 1 announcing the results, he thought it was an April Fools’ joke.

"I didn’t think we’d win in a nationwide contest," he said. "There’s so many schools out there, huge ones, and we’ve only been around for 10 years."

Discovering that the three winners were selected by a judging panel rather than by public vote made the win more meaningful.

"There was so much more value to it when we won because we knew that they chose our video based on its content and not just because of the number of people that we have going to our school," Hirokawa said.

See the video at vimeo.com/115688777.