Off the News: Welcome gift from Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan

It’s heartening when Hawaii residents with money choose to invest some of it into projects for the public good. Recent case in point: Billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, who own a compound on Kauai, have donated $50 million over seven years to the University of Hawaii for research on climate change impacts on the ocean.

The range of programs will include better documentation of changing ocean conditions, finding ways to support healthier ocean ecosystems and to enhance coastal resilience from sea-level rise, and studying problems for marine creatures.

Mahalo to Zuckerberg and Chan for this biggest gift in UH history — which continues making good on the couple’s pledge to engage in conservation efforts in Hawaii.

Losing teachers, even with incentives

Here’s more bad news to layer over the ongoing struggles to keep schools open, and kids learning, wherever they are: a persistently high turnover of the teaching force.

In the 2020-21 school year, 51% were still teaching after five years’ employment. That captures the worst of the remote-learning pressures of that first year, but the virus hasn’t made this one much better, even with $34.5 million invested in incentives.

Rather than advancing toward the 60% retention goal, we’re going backwards.