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Here we go again: The Hawaii Board of Education is trying to get ahead of the game by laying out a detailed process for Superintendent Keith Hayashi’s next evaluation, due next summer.

There’s just one big problem: The Sunshine Law might be getting in the way.

The BOE’s human resources committee wants the board members to discuss what they think of Hayashi secretly, behind closed doors. And that goes against what the Hawaii Supreme Court has said about conducting evaluations of top state officials in full view of the public.

The statewide school board from the committee at its meeting on Thursday. The agenda includes from HR committee chair Shanty Asher laying out proposed evaluation criteria and a timeline for the review.

On Aug. 22, 2024, the memo says, the board will go into executive session where it will go over Hayashi’s self-assessment and other information and then come to a consensus on a rating for him — from highly effective down to unsatisfactory. Then, the memo says, the board will go back into public session and give the public a summary of what they concluded.

Sigh.

The Sunshine Blog wonders if these board members just don’t pay attention to things that are relevant in their world. Or maybe they are purposely thumbing their noses at the Supreme Court.

Either way, here’s what they should be considering:

In 2019, the of whether county and state boards could claim the old standby “it’s a personnel matter” and hold secret discussions about hiring, firing or evaluating high-level government officials whom clearly the public has a deep interest in knowing about.

Citizens who do pay attention will remember this had to do with the Honolulu Police Commission’s closed-door talks about giving then-Honolulu Police Chief Louis Kealoha a $250,000 payoff as he was resigning in disgrace ahead of a federal corruption conviction. The commission thought the money would prevent the chief from suing the city if he decided he’d been forced to retire.

The Civil Beat Law Center for the Public Interest on the grounds that the public had a very big interest in hearing their thoughts and reasoning in the matter.

The Supreme Court agreed and said — and The Blog is layman-paraphrasing here — no executive session allowed unless the hiring, firing or evaluation involves a matter of personal privacy. And that means a highly personal or intimate matter, not just that you, the board member, don’t want it to get out that you were critical of someone. Or were OK with giving them a cool quarter million dollars on top of their lucrative pension even though there was a very likely possibility they would be spending that money in federal prison.

In the past four years, county boards and commissions have taken the high court’s guidance to heart and have been doing a pretty good job of dealing with the hiring, firing and evaluation processes in open meetings.

State boards, not so much. Civil Beat has asked the Office of Information Practices to weigh in a couple times recently when reporters were given heavily redacted minutes of executive sessions.

The Blog suspects legal action may be in the works on some of those cases. Hopefully BOE members will watch what happens.

Falling dominoes: Maui County Democrats are sending the names of three people to Gov. Josh Green for him to choose from to replace Troy Hashimoto as the state representative for House District 10.

They are, according to a press release from the Democratic Party that also included these descriptions:

• Timothy Scott Lara, local entrepreneur, and community leader.

• Leslee D. Matthews, social worker and local attorney.

• Tyson K. Miyake, former chief of staff to Mayor Mike Victorino.

The lucky winner will replace Hashimoto, who gave up his House seat to become the state senator for central Maui because the former senator, Gil Keith-Agaran, gave up his Senate seat to go back to full-time work as an attorney representing victims of the Maui wildfires in lawsuits against the state and others.

Musical Chairs, The Sequel: And speaking of Hawaii Democrats, the State Central Committee, the governing body of the party, has elected Adrian Tam as the new interim party chair. This all happened Saturday at a gathering of the Democratic Party of Hawaii.

Tam, a state representative from Honolulu, will keep the job until May when a new chair will presumably be elected at the state party convention. That should give Tam plenty of time to run for reelection to his District 24 seat covering Waikiki, McCully and Moiliili.

The Blog hates to be the one to say it, but the Dems have had just a bit of trouble keeping someone in that key leadership post. Tam is the second person to head things in about a month.

The old chair, Dennis Jung, was forced out in October over what some saw as lack of professionalism and poor performance — namely failing to raise money for such things as a presidential preference poll that the Dems want to hold next year.

He was replaced by Donna Domingo as acting chair, the Dem’s vice chair and the first female president of the Hawaii ILWU Local 142. That’s different than interim, we’re told.

Meanwhile, on an external issue — way, way, external — the party adopted a resolution calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the initiation of negotiations for a lasting peace. The resolution calls on Hawai’s congressional delegation to support the Ceasefire Now resolution introduced in Congress by U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri.

A party press release says the Hawaii Democrats are the second state party — Texas Dems were the first — to adopt such a resolution.

On the campaign trail: Voters in Mililani’s House District 38 will see a fresh face in the 2024 elections. Alexander Ozawa, a 19-year-old who graduated from Mililani High School just last year, has announced his candidacy for the seat currently held by Republican Lauren Matsumoto.

“I was born and raised in Mililani, and am excited at the prospect of joining the next generation of community and civic leaders to strengthen and empower the people of Central Oahu, the center of Honolulu county and one of the largest residential neighborhoods in the entire state,” Ozawa said in a press release sent out over the weekend by his extremely proud papa, Ryan Ozawa, a well-known local media personality and tech writer (who even used to write for Civil Beat).

Ozawa works as a full-time budget analyst for the Senate Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz.

The Blog can only hope that DDC transfers a little of that million dollars he’s got in his own campaign bank account to that of his young staffer.