Maui Prep becomes a shelter and distribution hub for fire survivors

The night the wildfires descended upon Lahaina, Maui Prep­aratory Academy was unexpectedly forced to become a makeshift shelter for nearly 700 frightened people, many of them blackened with soot or shivering from hours in the ocean to escape the flames.

Two days later the tiny private school transformed again, into an improvised distribution center providing food, clothing and aloha. Today it is giving safe harbor still, by enrolling an extra 140 students who were displaced by the fires.

And the school’s extra­ordinary saga began with a police officer’s late-night knock on a door.

On Aug. 8, power and telecommunications across much of West Maui were out. So while Ryan Kirkham, principal of the nonprofit school 6 miles north of Lahaina, had begun hearing a few stories trickle out of the burn zone, he could not yet know the full magnitude of the horror unfolding there.

At about 10:30 p.m. a Maui police officer came to his home.

“Are you from Maui Prep?” the officer said.

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go. We’ve got to open up your school as an evacuation site. They’re evacuating the Lahaina Civic Center. We have buses on the way up. You and I gotta go. Right now.”

They hurriedly made the mile drive to the campus, where they had only flashlights to wield against the pitch-black darkness due to the power outage. They had just wrestled the school gates and a few classrooms open when the county buses began arriving, bearing hundreds of people who earlier had sought shelter at the civic center but who officials were moving again out of the feared path of the flames.

Dazed, terrified, some injured, some soaked, the evacuees began stumbling out from the buses and into the void and the whipping wind.

“They were black, covered in soot and ash, a lot of them coughing because of smoke inhalation,” Kirkham recalled. “I remember carrying a little elderly lady. She said she was 82 years old. I carried her off the bus in my arms, and she said that she had spent three hours out in the water.”

Head of School Miguel Solis also had been at home earlier that evening and similarly with little word of the entire scope of the disaster, but a gnawing feeling in his gut from watching the fires’ menacing glow and listening to the howling winds kept him from sleeping.

“You know what, I’m heading up to school,” he finally told his wife, Lisa Zamora, who is academic dean and counselor at Maui Prep. “I don’t know what’s going on. I’m not hearing anything.”

He was stunned by the sight in his headlights: hordes of cars jamming Napilihau Street, the road leading up to the Maui Prep campus on the hill. “It felt like all of Lahaina town was here,” he said.

Solis, Kirkham and a growing volunteer army of faculty, parents, students and community members jumped into action, doing what they could, desperately improvising, because the campus that normally served about 300 students in preschool to 12th grade was not a designated shelter and unprepared for that night’s overwhelming wave of hurting people in need.

When some evacuees vomited or had no choice but to relieve themselves on the school grounds, staffers ran to open the school bathrooms. The roughly 15 classrooms turned into refuges from the ferocious weather. Flashlights and later a floodlight were somehow procured to give them sight. Piles of school shirts and hats were given away to people who had escaped half dressed.

When Solis saw one family he had known for years, he said they told him, “‘We were swimming all night. We were in the water.’ I go, ‘How are the girls?’ They said, ‘They’re so hungry. They’re so hungry! And I can’t find my parents!’” He took them to the school gym concession, which happened to be fully stocked with food for the scheduled Aug. 9 start of the fall term, and he handed them ramen, ice cream and snacks. Soon, Lisa Zamora and other volunteers were giving away all the food and drinks in the concession to the evacuees.

Solis hit the road again to round up some of his neighbors and more Maui Prep teachers. “I knocked on their doors and said, ‘I know it’s so crazy … but I need help,’” he said. They followed him back to campus with jugs of water and equipment and supplies.

“We had kids, alumni, staff all over, you name it, helping out the wounded, the people who were just in the water for hours,” Kirkham said. “We just did our best to get people into classrooms and out of the weather and the elements.”

Many evacuees were frantic and recounting harrowing close escapes, Kirkham said. “Some people knew that their houses were gone. … People were saying, ‘I literally got out of my car and started running, and I saw my car explode.’”

Solis got the gym showers open and ransacked the athletic director’s office for towels. He saw five men share a single shower spout to clean their faces, “and I noticed their eyes,” Solis recalls, his voice breaking. “They couldn’t even open their eyes, and little kids with gunk in their eyes — it was catastrophic.”

Into the next day, volunteers and supplies poured in seemingly from nowhere. One school staffer launched a handwritten list of evacuees’ names. A muscular community volunteer brought medicines and adult diapers. A man named Leo and his family who usually are employed to clean the school got busy with supporting the shelter operation. Kirkham’s son and some friends drove to the Ritz Carlton and came back with pool towels, which they used to wrap people for warmth. Another staff member who is a medical paraprofessional cared for people who were sick or hurt “day and night,” Solis said.

When the school’s septic system began to overflow because of the lack of electricity, and sewage came up through the shower drains, bathrooms had to be closed, which meant people again had to turn again to the campus bushes. Then a massive generator on a trailer miraculously appeared, and the electricity allowed the upper campus’ septic system to empty, allowing some bathrooms to reopen.

To this day, Solis marvels, “I still don’t know who, or what angel, brought this.”

From shelter to distribution hub

For two days the Maui Prep campus served this way as an emergency shelter, until officials said it was time to start moving evacuees into official shelters or hotels or other temporary housing — also a complicated operation. Buses ferried away many evacuees, but some were tourists who didn’t know what to do next and some people had no gas left. “I said, ‘You know what? Make friends, team up with someone, leave your cars here. I’ll make sure that Budget Rent A Car picks them up,’” Solis said.

But now still remaining were mountains of clothing, food, water, medicine and first aid items that members of the school community and town residents had brought for the shelter operation.

Upon hearing that some emergency supply distributions in other parts of Maui had been mobbed, the school team decided the Maui Prep campus could be an ideal location for a safe and orderly handout system. “Teachers are great with crowd control,” Solis quipped. “And we have a roundabout, and our campus is secure with a gate all around.”

So on Aug. 10 the Maui Prep team launched into its second makeshift disaster- support operation.

At 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. each day, staff members and security guards allowed lined-up cars to come in through the gate, four people at a time who were asked to remain in their vehicles. When they pulled up to the roundabout, Solis said, he would gently ask, “‘How many in your family? Did you lose your home? Do you need medicine, do you need women’s products?’ … And kids and teachers and faculty members and board members would gather the things that they needed.

“It was amazing. Like little ants. We all really came together,” he said.

Propane tanks were procured, volunteers began cooking and serving donated food, and Maui Food Bank drove over more provisions daily for the hungry.

Among those who came to the Maui Prep distribution was a man who arrived distraught, sobbing and barely able to speak. Solis was gradually able to persuade the man to tell part of his story: His son had died in the fires while holding his dog, and the man had found them and had just taken the boy’s body to police.

The staff loaded the man down with all the supplies he could handle, Solis recalls, his voice heavy with emotion: “We were somehow, I don’t know, wanting to make it better.”

Welcoming displaced students

After about five days of the school’s providing disaster relief, it was Solis’ 7-year-old son, Noah, who reminded him that restoring Maui Prep as a school as soon as possible would be the best next step for the welfare of the community’s keiki.

“He was tired of all this stuff that’s going on,” Solis recalled. “He said, ‘Daddy, I wanna go back to school.’”

But now Maui Prep was a changed school. After nearly a week of focusing on disaster assistance, school leaders decided to have it continue serving the community next by taking in as many of Lahaina’s 3,000-plus displaced students as it could fit.

They initially announced they could take in about 100 new students.

The families of more than 1,000 students applied.

Normally, tuition there ranges from $8,856 to $24,840. But through fundraising with donors, Solis said, the school has been able to say to displaced families, “‘Well, what can you afford?’ Some people have said $200. (We’ve said,) ‘All right, you’re in. A little skin in the game. We’ll cover the rest.’”

“Our call to action is to keep Lahaina students in Lahaina,” Solis wrote in a letter to parents and supporters. “We must keep the pulse of our devastated community strong and ensure our students have a safe, supportive and strong education while their parents grieve, work and handle what needs to be done. We are filling every seat and maximizing our campus to displaced students who will be welcomed with open arms, counseling and an opportunity to choose the course of their development, attend the college of their choice and give back to our community.”

At 7 a.m. Aug. 21, as a light rain fell on the Maui Prep campus, the faculty gathered to hear a conch shell and a Hawaiian chant and blessing. And then the keiki starting coming. And coming.

The teachers insisted they could accommodate more kids. Additional classroom aides were hired. Now the displaced students at Maui Prep total 140.

Nearly four weeks into the new school year, Maui Prep is almost unrecognizably crowded, with enrollment swollen by nearly 50%.

The school will never be the same, in both hard and good ways, Solis said.

With so much loss and devastation, some children and adults are struggling to heal from trauma. Solis said he often breaks into tears, and his son has had nightmares about the fires.

But Solis and Kirkham say they and every one of their employees but one have pledged to stay put. And Solis says the school and its ohana have discovered a renewed sense of purpose.

“Prior to the fire, there was this mindset: We’re going to keep our numbers low. We’re going to always be that little school,” Solis said. Now, “I want to be a part of this culture of giving, this culture of loving everybody no matter where, who and how much money you got — I don’t care. This is this is what it should be about.”