While Susan Essoyan’s article about Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students being suspended raises an issue, such suspensions are a mere symptom of more underlying root causes: compromised family structure in a broken home, incarceration of a parent and siblings and desperate socioeconomic conditions (“Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students are suspended more days than U.S. average,” Star-Advertiser, June 14).

These factors transcend ethnicity when observing similar trends among other minority-concentrated communities across the U.S. mainland, including African-Americans, Latino- Americans, and Native Americans.

The ACLU may mean well, but it is focusing on race, which only highlights the manifestation. Suspensions for egregiously wrong behavior should not cease. But intervention needs to take place at the household. Patience is key because culture changes at a glacial pace, be it locally or within a household.

The effects won’t be immediate — say within five years’ time — but helping to mitigate the causes by stabilizing families would yield substantial gains over a generation.

Von Kenric Kaneshiro

Downtown Honolulu

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