������Ƶ

Oct. 13 is the . This year it falls on a Friday.

Last year, I wrote about how celebrating our failures in Hawaii can be healthy and productive, especially for our bumbling public education system.

I continue to accept the wisdom of being able to admit mistakes, learn, and move forward. I continue to assert that Hawaii’s public schools will go nowhere until “failures” become a tool for growth instead of weapons of destruction or trifles to be ignored.

This year, to celebrate the Day for Failure, I’m reflecting on the biggest failure I had this past year, which led to the greatest success. Both, of course, involve education.�� Anyone who knows me, knows of my passion for education and common sense. For almost five years, I tried valiantly to convince the Board of Education to be more accessible to the public.

Five years seems to be the limit of my patience for dealing with idiocy. That was about the same length of time I lasted as a Hawaii public school teacher before exiting that toxic environment.

In 2010, Hawaii voters changed the Hawaii Constitution so that membership on the BOE became governor-appointed positions instead of elected positions. To Americans outside of Hawaii, this may seem democratically regressive. In Hawaii, where people get re-elected by name recognition or racial identification rather than qualifications or past performance, it actually makes sense. If the governor is ultimately responsible for the BOE, then at least somebody is.

Apparently, when there was an elected BOE, meetings were in the evenings — on Oahu (of course), and there was some time allotted during meetings for the public to air concerns not on the agenda. By the time I showed up at BOE meetings in 2012, Gov. Neil Abercrombie’s BOE appointees had moved BOE meetings to Tuesdays during the day.

Working people, like teachers, could not attend without taking time off of work (and still can’t). Public testifiers were forbidden to speak of anything not on the agenda, and curtly shut down if they did. It was, and still is, impossible to get anything on the agenda that the board chair doesn’t want to talk about.

There only one BOE in the entire state, and it’s largely inaccessible to the vast majority of Hawaii citizens.

After much public outcry, the BOE began holding occasional “Community Meetings” on Oahu and the outer islands. They are not attended by all board members nor covered by Sunshine Laws. I consider these community meetings to be a panacea for the fact that board meetings are still conducted during business hours two Tuesdays a month.

I understand the reasoning for doing business during business hours. It’s more cost effective, to be sure, and members who live on outer islands are limited by airline schedules to get home after the meetings.

Nonetheless, this is the one and only BOE in the entire state, and it’s largely inaccessible to the vast majority of Hawaii citizens. The oligarchy remains locked in its fortress, democracy be damned.

So, I came up with a solution that is used throughout the rest of the nation: Use modern technology to solve the problem. Duh!

If we record the meetings and put them online, everyone can see what’s going on and have an opportunity to be well-informed and engaged. I wrote about the idea in Civil Beat back in January 2015 after I’d started a Facebook group called to garner support.

There were more than 125 supporters when I gave up the ghost this year. Along with other volunteers, we had managed to record BOE meetings for over a year and make them available to the public for free on YouTube. But, we got no support from the Board of Education, and none would be forthcoming.

Gov. David Ige promised during his campaign to make state government agencies more open, transparent, accountable, etc. As soon as he took office in late 2014, I started writing to him about making the BOE meetings accessible to the public with videos, and talking to him whenever he showed up at an education conference I was attending.

It took well over a year to get a response from the governor’s office, and what a wishy-washy, namby-pamby one it was at that: “I urge you to give Ms. Ott’s request your serious consideration.”

In Hawaii that translates to a serpentine, “Trussst usss.�� We consssidered it. Now go away.”

I bugged the BOE for a response to my proposal to work with video volunteers. I’d already created a network and proven it was possible. Finally, on Oct. 10, 2016, without ever putting the issue on an agenda, I got this unsigned email from boe_hawaii@notes.k12.hi.us:

There you have it in a nutshell. This is why so many schools have such poor performance. Community engagement is a known component for successful schools, and the BOE, the Department of Education and the governor completely suck at it. They won’t work with volunteers, they don’t want the public to know what’s going on, and they give bogus nonsensical excuses. I had failed.

Sure, it was depressing to be reminded once again how dysfunctional the Hawaii public education system is, and how the members of the general public are nothing more than peons for the oligarchy to pat on the head and patronize.

But, it was helpful to learn once and for all that no matter what one does, it really is a completely hopeless situation until the board, the superintendent and the governor decide to make community engagement in public education an authentic priority. That realization, that death of hope, helped me to give up and walk away.

Nice To Be Appreciated

This freed up a lot of time and mental energy. I started offering piano lessons, and providing music education for at least some of the Hawaii kids who aren’t getting any in the public schools. That’s been rewarding and nourishing for the soul because I am a very good teacher, and it’s nice to finally be appreciated for that in Hawaii. All it took was getting away from the DOE and the BOE.

I also had time to focus on a special education kid I was volunteering to tutor, and out of that has come an amazing success story. Written off as mentally deficient, this poor child was simply not being educated. Ten years old and he couldn’t read, write a sentence, add numbers up to 20, and so much more. If I was new to the DOE, I would have been shocked because he doesn’t seem to be mentally deficient much at all. What does seem “slow” I now wonder if it isn’t just poor training.

After a little tutoring on the weekends and during the summer, his mother could see that her son might actually have the potential for a successful future. Maybe he isn’t retarded.

In a short amount of time this kid is reading better, has learned how to read a map, tie his shoes, tell time, hold a pencil properly and write some fairly decent sentences. His folks got him a computer to access the online learning tools I’d selected for him such as and Google images to build vocabulary, but the library which is where he could hook into the internet is not a good learning environment if one needs to talk and explain.

When the school principal refused to allow the student to come on campus with the supervision of his mother over the summer to gain internet access, I suggested home schooling for this school year. Mom jumped at the opportunity.

It hasn’t been all been easy, of course. However, in just one month, my home schooler, his mom and I have had enough victories that the project is already a success. I’m excited to see what a whole year of home schooling will do.

This Friday the 13th I’ll be celebrating the fact that my BOE volunteer video advocacy failed, and opened the door for me to help my little 10-year-old friend have a completely different life than one he was headed for just six months ago. I may have lost hope that the Hawaii public education system is fixable, but a new hope was born in its place.