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At least two tragedies hit Hawaii in 2023. One you can easily guess, the Lahaina fire, which was a calamity because it was exceptional.

The other you probably wouldn’t guess. It’s the Department of Education’s failure to spend a half-billion dollars the Legislature gave it for school construction and repairs.  

That one is a tragedy because it’s so ordinary that it is easy to ignore. 

The school issue has shown signs of becoming no story at all, not something to be fixed but something to be diminished and disappeared through an on- again off-again process of business as usual. 

The DOE failure is its own crisis because it gnaws away at things that people want to take for granted, like having good schools in good shape run by able administrators who know what they are doing, and when money is allocated to make those better, it’s actually used to do so. 

Most of all, getting what they were promised, like a music room at Farrington High School or a parking structure at Hilo High.

It’s also part of a continuing crisis in the way things get done here.

The first sign of this is how little the public was told. 

The DOE failed to spend this money. It’s no longer theirs to spend. This failure took the Legislature by surprise. The assistant superintendent in charge was relieved of his duties about the same time though no mention of whether that has to do with the failure.

That’s all the public information available.  What went wrong?  You might as well have used tarot cards.

Until a Civil Beat article earlier this week broke the manini information mold, we had no idea.

Now we know more, but it’s still mostly can’t say, won’t say, may never say, especially to the public. We’ll get back to you soon, but maybe not.  

A legislative committee held a hearing where some legislators cookie-cuttered a suggestion that DOE needed new procedures. The DOE hired a new assistant superintendent to replace Randy Tanaka who, come January, will be working for a key state senator.

According to Civil Beat, the problem is that the DOE gets way more money from the Legislature than it can possibly spend on time. 

The problem seems to be a combination of a clog and a morass. Does a funded project that’s not implemented, like the one at Farrington High School, keep or lose its place in line? The answer is that there is no definitive answer. The whole thing is really complicated, involving changes in the way the Legislature and DOE deal with this. 

DOE has done what agencies typically do — get rid of the old boss and hire a new one. That’s a quick response, not a quick fix. There are no possible quick fixes. “New leadership” in this context is another red flag that this problem will disappear from the public eye.

Remember how bad Maui administrators and politicians looked when they hemmed and hawed about the fire? They looked incompetent because they really did stumble around.  

They also looked bad because the public actually got to see it. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide — that’ll bring focus to a public official. That’s also responsible governing.

Media coverage was key to making this happen. Everything pushed in the direction of “more,” more information, more accountability. The fire is never off the table.

There are several well publicized official investigations of the fire going on. Each of these, one way or the other, is focused on these three questions: 

What happened? Why and how did it happen? What can be done to keep it from happening again?

Those questions are exactly the ones that need to be asked about the DOE’s failure.

The DOE issue could disappear, not because there will be a coverup but because these kinds of issues are hard to keep an eye on. They are not sexy. Dealing with them occurs beneath the surface with no heroes or villains. Plenty of places to run. Plenty of places to hide.

It takes a real effort to bring them to light and keep them there.

Imagine what would have happened if the Maui people in charge had reacted to the Lahaina fires the way folks in charge have reacted to the DOE’s failure.

That’s unimaginable.  

Now, imagine a DOE money investigation that addressed the what-why-what-can questions and reported the answers publicly. Imagine the school superintendent holding a public meeting to explain and discuss the answers.

That’s hard to imagine because, well, things aren’t done here that way. 

Why not? Whatever the process — it certainly does not have to be as dramatic or require as much resources as the fire investigations — those three questions are at the heart of political accountability.

They are commonsensical questions.

Facts are what we need to know to make judgements.

No wonder the default explanations for bad tidings in Hawaii are “They’re all corrupt. This state can’t do anything right. Can’t trust any of them.”

I get it, but at the same time think how limited those responses are. They are based on feeling, not facts, on sweeping generalizations rather than specific information.

So, the DOE issue is a crisis in several ways:

It quietly dashes expectations that parents have about the schools their kids attend.  

It’s part of a continuing crisis of non-information and “nothing to see here we will take care of it”.  

It increases our cynicism, which lowers our expectations.

It makes a farce out of legislative oversight. Legislators, who are exceptionally interested in school repairs and construction because they are such a visible sign of bringing home the bacon in their districts, find out about this well after they could try to do anything about it. That’s amazing.

If it’s business as usual, the media will give the whole thing a quick pass and move on to keeping us up to date on the price of ahi.

Follow up, follow up, follow up.

I hate the expression “from crisis comes opportunity.” It is such an empathy-deadening cliché.  

Still, one thing stands out about the fire that does offer an opportunity.  

The questions being asked about the fire are a guide to better government. They need to be asked everywhere, all the time, and answered in ways that the public can access and understand. Then action is taken based on the answers.

It shouldn’t take the unimaginable death and destruction of a fire to make the public, politicians, and news people focus on how important these questions are for ordinary people in their ordinary lives.