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In the 1920s, students would set up games and a maypole with multicolored streamers under the shade of the Lahaina banyan tree. Each spring, hundreds of people would turn out to watch student dances, kite-flying contests and the coronation of the school’s May Day court.

In the 1950s, truckloads of students would arrive from nearby plantations to the Front Street campus. Nearby shopkeepers would allow students to purchase treats on credit if they didn’t have enough money for after-school snacks. 

When the school celebrated its centennial birthday in 2013, families and alumni raised thousands of dollars to create a bronze bust of the school’s namesake, the third king of the Hawaiian Kingdom, to commemorate the campus’ history in Lahaina.   

That bust was one of the few relics of the campus that survived when wildfires burned across Lahaina 10 years later. The elementary school was burned beyond repair, along with over 2,200 structures in the historic town.   

Since the fires, roughly 350 students have relocated to a temporary campus near the Kapalua Airport. The Department of Education is looking to build a permanent school for West Maui students, and Lahaina residents remain divided on where that place should be.  

Many alumni, staff and long-time residents feel the new school’s location can play an important role in the reconstruction of Lahaina, but are torn between holding onto the town’s past and building responsibly for its future. 

Some believe the campus should return to Front Street — where there has been a school since the days of the Hawaiian monarchy — to honor its legacy and connection to the community. Others worry that the original site was always poised for a natural disaster due to its close proximity to the ocean and location in a tsunami zone. 

There’s no easy answer, said Leslie Hiraga, who attended the school in the 1970s. She wants to see the new campus built out of the tsunami zone, but she also understands people’s deep attachment to the school. 

“It galvanized the whole island together,” Hiraga said, adding that families continued to return to the Front Street campus long after their children completed elementary school.

A Storied Legacy

The elementary school’s location on Front Street was meant to be, said historian Ronald Williams Jr. 

The campus originally served as a burial site for Queen Keopulani, wife of Kamehameha I who died as the highest-ranking ruler in the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1823. Nobility from across the island gathered on what later became the elementary school campus to pay their respects, Williams said. 

“That was an incredibly powerful site, that whole area,” Williams said. 

The land later hosted Luaehu School, named after the site of the 1840 constitution that spurred the creation of Hawaii’s first government-led education system. The school was created to train the future leaders of Hawaii, and King Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma often handpicked students to attend the prestigious campus. 

By the late 1860s, Luaehu School had left Maui. Lahaina’s Government School, which served roughly 90 boys and girls in the 1880s, began occupying the small campus, which held five classrooms at the time.

“If, however, there be now no royal palace at Lahaina, the place is still remarkable for its schools,” author George Bowser wrote in a directory of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1880.

By 1913, state leaders had constructed a two-story building for the growing school and named it after King Kamehameha III, honoring the constitution he developed and signed in Lahaina. 

Despite the school’s long history, many students grew up unaware of the campus’ role in Lahaina’s development, said Leinaala Seeger, who attended King Kamehameha III School in the 1950s. As a child, Seeger added, the two-story wooden building felt so large and imposing that she mistakenly believed she was learning in the former palace of the king.

Students and the community took pride in maintaining and caring for the campus, said Clifton Akiyama, who attended the school from 1949 to 1958. He looked forward to polishing the fire escape so he could slide down the staircase after school and took turns washing pots and pans in the cafeteria with his peers. 

At Christmas, he added, children would always look forward to receiving brown bags filled with fruits, nuts and candy donated from local businesses. 

Akiyama estimated that the school served roughly 600 children in kindergarten through eighth grade while he was a student. While the school eventually replaced its two-story building with a larger one-story structure that could fit more classrooms in the late 1950s, students continued to stretch the campus to its limits. 

By the 1970s, Maui’s pineapple and sugarcane industries were slowing down, and smaller public schools surrounding the plantation camps had begun to close. Students who previously received their education on the plantations began enrolling in King Kamehameha III Elementary.

To accommodate the growing number of students attending classes in town, Lahaina Intermediate and Princess Nahienaena Elementary opened in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  

But space at King Kamehameha III Elementary remained limited, and Lahaina’s development as a thriving tourist town prevented expansion, said former principal Steve Franz, who worked at the school from 1995 to 2022. 

At its peak, he added, the campus enrolled roughly 850 students — almost double the size of an average elementary school in Hawaii. 

Despite the school’s small size, families would crowd onto the campus for every occasion. 

Jen Mather, president of the school’s parent-teacher organization, fondly recalled the battle over parking that families faced every year as they showed up in droves to watch the school’s annual hoike, or performance filled with hula and songs. Mather’s two children attended the school between 2014 and 2020. 

“The community always rallied around us,” Mather said. 

School events were particularly well-attended in the 2013-14 academic year, when King Kamehameha III Elementary celebrated its 100th anniversary and the community rallied to create and install a bronze bust of the king. 

Even after the anniversary passed, Franz said, community members took pride in the campus’ newest addition and would annually adorn the bust with leis for King Kamehameha III’s birthday. 

As part of his plans to commemorate the anniversary, Franz bought a fireproof cabinet to hold old yearbooks, photos and research community members had put together for of the school’s history. While Franz made the purchase as a precautionary measure, the cabinet would later protect many of the school’s historical documents from the wildfires last summer. 

“We put that cabinet in our store room, thinking, ‘We’ll never need it. There’s never going to be a fire, right?’” Franz said. “Schools don’t burn down.”

The Question of Rebuilding

On Front Street, room 17 at King Kamehameha III Elementary stands exactly as it was before the fires. The bright orange door remains completely intact, beanbag chairs sit in the middle of the room and a handwritten message on the whiteboard reads, “Have a great day!”. 

But fallen trees and debris are piled high outside the classroom’s windows. When wildfires swept through Lahaina last August, they destroyed most of the historic campus beyond repair.

Following the loss of their campus, students at King Kamehameha III Elementary took lessons online, attended class at Princess Nahienaena Elementary and, finally, transitioned to a temporary campus at the Pulelehua housing development near the end of the 2023-24 school year. The temporary site consists of 30 modular buildings and can serve up to 600 students.

The department hopes to transition to a permanent elementary school in the next three to five years to minimize the costs of operating the temporary campus. Leaders have proposed three options for rebuilding King Kamehameha III Elementary: creating a permanent campus at the Pulelehua project, returning to Front Street or building at Puukolii Village Mauka in Kaanapali.

DOE brought families and staff members together in May to discuss the future of the school. During the community meetings, the department recommended rebuilding the permanent site at the Pulelehua project, citing concerns that the original Lahaina campus was located in a tsunami zone and the Kaanapali housing project had no existing infrastructure to support a school.

Even before the fires, Pulelehua developers agreed to build a new school on its property to help King Kamehameha III Elementary accommodate the growing number of families in West Maui. Of the three options, only the Pulelehua project would fit the department’s goal of moving to a permanent campus in the near future.

But parents and teachers who attended the meetings said the department seemed to have made its decision on the permanent campus without seriously consulting the community. In a after the May meeting, a majority of respondents said they wanted to return King Kamehameha III Elementary to Lahaina. 

Generations of families attended the Front Street campus, and DOE needed to offer more options that better reflect residents’ visions of a reconstructed Lahaina, said Justin Hughey, who taught at the elementary school until last year. He, along with other community members, has proposed rebuilding the school in Lahaina but on a site farther away from the ocean. 

While the department said in May that it intended to choose a site by June, it has not yet shared any updates on the permanent location. 

Karen Pascual, who taught at the elementary school for 30 years, said families took pride in sending their children to the campus. If the school returns to Lahaina, she added, she believes more local families will return to the town during the rebuilding process. 

“I just feel like we’re the perfect fit for being there,” Pascual said, adding that she wouldn’t want Lahaina to solely consist of tourist attractions and retail stores. “I feel like a big piece of our town would be just missing if we weren’t there.” 

But not all families feel safe returning to the old location. 

Keolaonakaielua Mather attended the elementary school from 2015 to 2020 and has fond memories of the campus. But she said attending school in a tourist town meant that visitors would sometimes take photos of the campus and children without permission or forget to slow down their cars for students crossing the street.  

The school’s close proximity to the ocean also required students to practice tsunami evacuation drills regularly, Mather added, although it didn’t feel realistic or safe to herd so many children away from campus during an emergency. 

“Are we willing to jeopardize our children’s safety for the sake of nostalgia?” Mather asked, adding that she would like to memorialize the original campus without rebuilding a school there. “It’s not going to disappear from history.” 

Some residents simply want more time to consider their options. It’s unclear how many families will return to Lahaina and need a school in town to serve their children, said Ian Swezey, who attended King Kamehameha III Elementary from 1949 to 1954. He ultimately hopes to see the school returned to its original Front Street location, as long as the department takes necessary precautions against climate change and building in a tsunami zone. 

Since the fires, Lahaina’s four public schools have lost roughly 1,000 students. The department has projected that King Kamehameha III Elementary’s population will drop to roughly 325 students by the 2029-30 school year, compared to the over 600 students it enrolled last August. 

Pascual said she understands people’s safety concerns about returning the school to Lahaina, but she believes the department could mitigate the dangers of rebuilding near the ocean if needed. The school always relied on the support and generosity of local families and businesses, Pascual added, and, in return, the community took pride in helping to raise generations of Lahaina children. 

“Their presence in the town is what makes a town,” Pascual said about her former students. “Right now, we’re a little bit lost, I think.” 

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.