Hawaii Teacher of the Year Jackie Freitas’ fourth child is due in a week, but at the moment that’s not the date she’s focused on most.
Suited up in dirt-crusted farm boots and black leggings, her Leilehua High School polo shirt gently stretched over her pregnant belly, Freitas is in constant motion over every inch of this Wahiawa school’s 3.5-acre farm — lugging heavy pails of feed for the chubby pigs and clucking fowl, bagging fresh produce, teaching in her classroom, hand-watering anthuriums in the shade houses and hollering instructions to her students to weed the crops and hose off the “choo-choo cars” for the farm’s keiki train.
The school’s sixth annual Fall Fest, which she founded, takes place tomorrow (see accompanying box), so the mood is urgent and no one gets to rest. Not the students, not Freitas’ family and not even Freitas, who could give birth any day now.
When asked Tuesday what preparations for the festival she and her students and family still needed to carry out, Freitas took a deep breath and ticked off a long list: Make poi, smoke meat, harvest vegetables, put up tents and clean out the fields to make them neat and welcoming for the 1,600-plus attendees expected.
“He’s gotta stay in this week,” she joked with a grin, patting her middle. “No choice.”
Freitas’ relentless drive and energy is one of the many reasons she was named Hawaii’s top public school teacher for this school year, selected from among 13,000 teachers statewide, and will represent Hawaii in the 2024 National Teacher of the Year competition in the spring in Washington, D.C.
On the Oct. 3 afternoon when she was lauded in a fancy ceremony at the governor’s mansion in Honolulu, posed for photos with dignitaries and answered media questions, she still had to peel off her lei afterward and go back to the farm to tend the animals and crops, prep the kitchen and lock up the tractors.
“This is my passion. … Everything I do is for my students,” says “Auntie Jackie,” as her students fondly call her.
At Leilehua, her alma mater, where she has taught all of her 13 years as a teacher, Freitas is the natural resources teacher and Future Farmers of America adviser. She oversees one of the state’s largest high school agricultural farms, which includes more than four dozen animals, traditional farmland, a hydroponic greenhouse, a bee apiary, animal husbandry, floriculture and agricultural vertical towers. She’s even learned and then taught her students technological innovations such as coding “farm bots” to water, fertilize and weed vegetable beds.
Freitas teaches six classes doubled up over three periods each day: food production 1 and 2, natural resources, wildlife, small animals and large animals. Three other periods are devoted to maintaining the plants and animals.
She presides over this learning center seven days a week, often working in the fields until well after sunset — the animals have to eat, she explains, and she can’t let the plants die. Her husband, R.J.; her three children; her parents; and many of her 200 students she calls her “love bugs” also volunteer far beyond the dismissal bell.
When the baby comes, says Freitas, she’ll probably be out for a couple of weeks, then she’ll be right back in action, as she was with her other kids.
Freitas said she feels compelled to give her all for her students, especially during Fall Fest, because it is “something many people in our community look forward to, and my students feel excited seeing how many people come to support what they do.”
Leilehua junior Zy Tilo says working with his hands in the soil has actually changed him.
As the 16-year-old tended rows of won bok, he confessed that he doesn’t consider himself a strong student but has seen a career for himself in agriculture ever since he started taking classes with Freitas as a freshman and “got hooked” by a project in which he grew carrots for the first time.
He had disliked the root vegetable previously, but now, “I love carrots. We grow them here, and we eat them out of the ground,” Tilo said. “So awesome. … Every since we started to grow them in my freshman year, I couldn’t stop eating carrots. It’s really fresh, really juicy.”
He feels he’s a different kind of person now. “Before, I used to be kind of sour. I used to be upset, I used to be angry at people,” he said, smiling. Now, “I take my stress out on the field, come out here, pull some weeds. Feeling good, plant something.”
Leilehua junior Lorelei McDaniel also imagines a career for herself possibly in agricultural business or perhaps marine biology. As she cut fluffy, oversize heads of Manoa lettuce from the hydroponic lines and bagged them for sale, she said she relishes the problem-solving that growing plants requires.
“You’ve got to come up with, like, what plants can deter this insect? Or, what plant goes well with this other plant? And ducks are great at getting rid of snails, but they might go after the plants,” McDaniel said. She’s already planning her spring project: testing which of three types of media will make oyster mushrooms grow best.
Freitas has a special way of compelling students into learning, state schools Superintendent Keith Hayashi said.
Her “passion and innovative teaching methods allow students to reach new horizons,” Hayashi said in a statement. He called her “a prime example of a teacher leader in our state — pioneering new curriculum to ensure that students are globally competitive, initiating community programs that connect student work with real-world challenges, and connecting with colleagues to support future teacher leaders.”
At a recent state Board of Education meeting, he added that “what is amazing is the engagement that she has with students, and really helping to connect real-world authentic opportunities and learning with students, to get them excited about what they’re doing.”
Freitas said that while agriculture involves tough physical labor, it is also technology and science and math, testing of theories, trial and error — one of the original kinds of “project-based learning” that existed long before that became a buzz phrase in education.
But also she loves to cultivate the magic, the “aha” moment of growing something, that pulls students in and molds and changes them, Freitas says.
“A lot of these kids don’t know where their food comes from” she said.
“When they put a seed in the ground, they nurture it and take care of it, I like just watching their faces when, especially if it’s an underground vegetable and they don’t get to watch it mature the whole time … they harvest and go, ‘Wow!’ I love to see their eyes sparkling.”
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Fall Fest
>>When: 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday
>> Where: Leilehua High School Agriculture Learning Center, 1515 California Ave., Wahiawa
>> Admission: One canned good or $1 per person
>> Activities: Pick and purchase a pumpkin; enjoy baked goods and food booths; sales of fresh produce, student-made products and school logo items; games; keiki train ride; food trucks
>> On the net: leilehua.k12.hi.us
