Retired professor, 94, sponsors scholarships for future teachers

Professor Delores Curtis retired from teaching 30 years ago, but she hasn’t stopped working to provide students a good education and support teachers’ professional development.

At 94, her latest effort is a college scholarship program to enable people from Waianae and other economically challenged areas to become teachers on the Leeward Coast.

“We’re going to get local teachers for local kids,” said Curtis, a physical education professor emerita at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “The kids will benefit from it, and the whole community does (too).”

Since 2018 she has allocated scholarship funds for several students each year that will total more than $450,000 by the end of this year. Curtis is concentrating on the Leeward Coast because she noticed that the public school system often sent inexperienced teachers, many from the mainland, to work with students who usually came from troubled homes.

Scholarships are available at Leeward Community College through the INPEACE (Institute for Native Pacific Education and Culture) program; at UH West Oahu through the University of Hawaiʻi Foundation.

“The people out in the Leeward area are at the bottom of the list, and so they have a turnover of teachers. They have foreigners from the mainland that get sent out there, and it’s a different culture — it’s Hawaiian!” she said.

Most newcomers didn’t connect well with the disadvantaged rural kids and moved away as quickly as they could, and students didn’t thrive. Curtis started the scholarship program to provide an education degree for teachers with the same West Oahu background, who better understand the family dynamics of their students and are committed to serving their schools.

This way, “the kids get steady teachers, people that are going to stay there and invest their energy in being a teacher,” Curtis said.

Recipients must be Hawaii residents and graduates of Waianae, Nanakuli, Campbell, Waipahu or Kapolei high schools with some degree of financial need.

The scholarships were made possible when her lifelong friend and colleague, Sue Hanson, died about five years ago, bequeathing a large inheritance to Curtis. Money also is drawn from Curtis’ own savings to fund the Sue K. Hanson and Delores M. Curtis Scholarship.

Far from being wealthy, Curtis lives modestly in a comfortable, older house in Honolulu she bought in 1965. Why did she decide to spend her inheritance from Hanson on scholarships? “What else am I going to do with it?” she said matter-of-factly. “I own the house, and I can’t go anywhere because I’m crippled up.”

Curtis has used a cane and a walker to get around since she fell three years ago. That was the end of her golfing days, but she still rides in a golf cart with her friend once a week to watch her play.

She was a darn good golfer over the years with no handicap (the lower the handicap, the more skillful the golfer), admittedly bragging, “I got seven holes in one!” as she lifted up a little trophy she won for one of them.

Curtis chose physical education as a career after playing recreational softball, basketball and other sports growing up in the rural countryside of Indiana, where girls received PE classes until they were in high school. There were no organized athletic programs for females while she was in college.

The reason she loved sports? “I did not do it for fitness. I did it for fun and companionship.”

Her concern for the education of kids can be traced back to her first job in Hawaii at UH in 1963 after moving from Valparaiso, Ind. She spent half her time teaching college students and the rest of it teaching PE to elementary-age kids at the University Laboratory School in Manoa.

She was impressed by two ex-Navy teachers she befriended who taught PE at Makaha Elementary School, in an experimental program that also included music and library activities that exposed the kids to wider interests. That lasted just one year, but it introduced her to West Oahu.

The Makaha program inspired Curtis to persuade the principal of the UH Lab School to provide its students with daily full-time PE instruction, and Sue Hanson from Illinois was hired to help Curtis. After more than a decade, Curtis was transferred to work full time for the UH College of Education and Instruction department.

“It just broke my heart to lose those kids because I kinda invested my life in them,” she said.

Her new job was to help develop PE curriculum for the state Department of Education and train elementary school teachers all over Hawaii. The work gave her insight about the educational shortcomings in different areas of the state.

After retiring in 1993, Curtis became more active in the Hawaii Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, an organization that supports community and school programs, “to give other people the opportunity to have fun like I did.” She was once president of the national organization’s Southwest district in the 1970s, and has made friends with teachers throughout the U.S.

But even before that, Curtis supported the expansion of sports opportunities for women. Those doors opened in 1972 when Title IX of the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, insuring equality in federally funded education and athletic programs.

In 2003, Curtis received the “Joy of Effort” award, given to “people who give of themselves,” by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education. While Curtis is proud of the award, she said she just enjoys being able to give and “help teachers get better.”