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Concerns about child harassment and a hostile work environment at a private college-prepatory school in Kapolei are alarming parents, driving away teachers and raising questions about the consequences of letting private schools in Hawaii regulate themselves.

Parents and teachers have been complaining about American Renaissance Academy for weeks, including numerous requests to the to step in.

But school administrators insist that the problems are being overblown and that a few disgruntled teachers have incited a handful of parents to speak out.

Civil Beat interviewed about 15 parents and teachers, most of whom would only speak if their names weren’t used for fear of retribution. Civil Beat also tried to talk to the school’s administrators, who for the most part declined to comment.

The situation does offer a hard lesson for parents who want to send their kids to an independently owned and operated educational institution: there is little oversight of these private businesses. Accreditation organizations don’t conduct frequent checkups on the schools, and aside from financial disclosure filings with the IRS there is no public accounting of how the school is spending the thousands of dollars these families pay for tuition.

American Renaissance Academy

American Renaissance Academy, or ARA as it’s known, is a 7-year-old college preparatory school that serves 125 students in grades pre-kindergarten through 12 and per year in tuition.

Former ARA board member and parent Augie Tulba — a well-known local comedian also known as “Augie T” — told Civil Beat his experiences at the school haven’t revealed any serious wrongdoing or mismanagement.

“It’s a family-run school … And when you only have one entity running things there’s always going to be some kind of dissension among families, teachers, parents — it’s understandable,” said Tulba, who served on the board until deciding to devote his time to a new job last year. “The school is so small, people see things, and everybody knows each other’s business … But I’m a total believer that if it’s not run correctly, it’s going to slowly die.”

But Jaimi Dennis says she pulled her 4-year-old son out of ARA when she realized school administrators weren’t going to act on a complaint she filed last year against a fourth-grade teacher who, Dennis alleges, verbally harassed her child.

Several other parents have come forward to Civil Beat with similar stories about the school, accusing the same fourth-grade teacher of child harassment and criticizing administrators for failing to respond to their concerns. But most of them asked to remain anonymous because they fear retribution.

Approached by Civil Beat on the school’s campus recently, the teacher brusquely declined to comment and refused to say whether the harassment allegations are true.

Meanwhile, four other teachers have left their jobs at ARA in recent weeks, citing a hostile work environment and a constant fear of retaliation for speaking out for defending the parents, students and fellow faculty members.

“The problem is that they (the school administrators) are trying to lead through fear and intimidation,” said Debra Hingst, a high school teacher at the academy who is also Dennis’s mother but still works at the school. “A lot of good teachers have walked out the door.”

Parent-Teacher Meeting

The controversies plaguing ARA went on full display earlier this month, when dozens of parents flooded the school cafeteria one evening for a parent-teacher group meeting, many of them to demand that the de facto school head — Daimon Hudson — step down and that the school properly investigate the teacher who had allegedly mistreated a student. Civil Beat attempted to attend the meeting but was asked to leave the room.

Several people recorded the meeting and provided Civil Beat with copies. The recordings show parents lambasting Hudson and other officials for their handling of the issues.

“We can get over this bump and make a better academy and make the Punahou of the West Side,” Hudson said in the meeting. “But we need to stick together.”

Still, it’s unclear what is being done internally to solve the controversies — and whether a third-party agency would even have any say in the matter — because private schools aren’t accountable to the public.

That freedom is the underlying tenet that sets private schools apart from their Department of Education-run counterparts, but it also makes solving disputes like those at the Kapolei school particularly difficult. The state DOE stopped licensing private schools and certifying private school teachers as the result of a . The law effectively created a system of .

Even Robert Witt, executive director of the , doesn’t know how he’s going to approach the situation. Many former and current teachers at the academy, including Hingst, have filed complaints with the association.

But the association is an umbrella organization that represents and advocates for private schools, and while it does facilitate school accreditation it doesn’t serve as a regulatory agency.

 
“We’re not a crisis-management firm,” Witt said, adding that he can’t say much more about the scenario until he speaks with other people at the school. “Our approach to internal school matters must be judicious.”

For the most part, private schools are tasked with with the help of a governing board. That structure — coupled with accreditation and the mere fact that schools rely on parents who pay for tuition and can choose to withdraw their kids if they’re dissatisfied — is widely seen among private-school advocates as adequate for accountability purposes.

But teachers and parents familiar with ARA say the school is deteriorating precisely because it’s left to its own devices, lacks checks and balances and, at least for now, can rely on parents who don’t have much choice.

Parents said they’re already bound by contract to paying whatever they owe for the year’s tuition — even if their children leave the academy in the middle of the school year. Many of them spoke to Civil Beat on the condition that their names not be used because they feared having their kids expelled while still having to pay the bill, which in full per year. (Read Civil Beat’s policy on use of anonymous sources.)

The school, they added, is one of the only college-preparatory private schools in West Oahu.

School Accountability

More than a dozen people have said that most of the school’s problems trace back to the tight-knit group of people, many of them family members, who both run day-to-day operations and tacitly dominate the school board.

That group includes Hudson, who is president of ARA’s parent-teacher group and is listed in as the school’s director; Hudson’s wife Kelly Tanizaki, who is the school’s CEO but has recently taken leave and put Hudson in charge; and Tanizaki’s father, Kenneth Tanizaki, who serves on the school’s .

Melissa Forrest, a kindergarten teacher at ARA, was the first person to reach out to Civil Beat with the concerns, including claims that the school’s leaders are on a witch-hunt to get rid of outspoken teachers. Forrest says she witnessed the teacher at the center of parents’ complaints bully students and faculty members on numerous occasions and has been punished for speaking out about those incidents, including a dispute that ultimately put her on forced leave for about a week earlier this month.

“It’s a constant state of turmoil there,” said Forrest, who still works at the school. “We don’t have an advocate.”

Hudson has declined to comment on specific controversies but did say in an email that he and Kelly Tanizaki are volunteers who aren’t on the ARA payroll. He also pointed to the school’s six-year accreditation with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, which was on the condition that the school comply with a range of stipulations, including that it conduct an independent audit and hire a principal. (The school appointed a principal earlier this month — just two days after Civil Beat first inquired with the school about the controversies.)

The Western Association of Schools and Colleges is one of six regional accrediting bodies in the country and, by default, in essence oversees the schools it accredits. Private schools in Hawaii aren’t required by law to have accreditation, though most do.

Civil Beat reviewed the accreditation process, which appears to be rigorous and includes a peer-review process, committee visits to the school and a multi-year action plan. But it’s unclear what penalties a school faces if it diverges from accreditation criteria or violates its action plan.

The Western Association of Schools and Colleges did not respond to requests for comment.

Myra McGovern, spokeswoman of the National Association of Independent Schools, the national umbrella organization representing private schools, noted that there are two sides to every story and said it’s typically up to a school to work out issues such as those brewing at ARA.

When it comes to controversies such as these, she said, parents should typically start by going directly to the teacher who they’re concerned about then working their way “up the chain” if that attempt doesn’t work out. Next people in that chain of command, according to McGovern, include assistant heads, deans of faculty or, if all else fails, school board members.

“The school really … has to figure out how it runs best, and that school is not necessarily going to be the right place for everyone,” she said. “If it’s too big of a concern, people end up voting with their feet.”

Personnel Fallout

Forrest and two of the teachers who recently resigned say they were falsely accused of stealing.

What they were accused of “stealing,” the teachers say, were the personal school supplies that belong to former fourth- and fifth-grade teacher Cara Cornelison, who requested that they recover her things after she left her job earlier this month following a disagreement with the school administration. That controversy surrounding the situation quickly prompted former teacher Danette Buckley to resign and withdraw her daughter, a student, from ARA as well.

“I said, ‘You left me no choice but to resign immediately,’” said Buckley, who was hired last year and now works as a teacher in a public school. “‘You accused me of stealing. That has to do with my integrity, and that’s the last straw … I expected my first year to be rough, but within a matter of weeks (of starting) I was ready to quit.”

“The teachers currently there need to run as fast as they can.”’

Several parents said Hudson later informed them that Forrest had gotten caught stealing and would be fired. But the school’s human resources firm quickly cleared all the teachers of the theft allegations, according to Forrest, who said she wasn’t given any paperwork documenting the incident or the firm’s decision.

Before Buckley and Cornelison, it was math teacher Leanna Chew, who says she was forced to resign in late December — a “humiliating” incident that her former colleagues describe as the result of an “unethical” and “unprofessional” effort to smear her for reasons that are unclear.

Still, more than a dozen people, including the teachers and several parents, say the teacher accused of harassment is at the center of many of the personnel issues and the families’ overall dissatisfaction with the school. They wonder why she hasn’t even been placed on leave.

And school officials aren’t talking. So in this situation parents and teachers are left with little recourse but to leave the school and, in the parents’ case, forfeit the money they’ve laid out for tuition.