The state Public Charter School Commission decided Monday to temporarily reinstate funding for the troubled Halau Lokahi Charter School, allowing 60 remaining students to finish the school year at the Hawaiian culture-focused campus.
The commission voted to postpone until May 31 its previous decision in January to issue the Kalihi school a formal prospect of revocation notice due to insolvency.
Halau Lokahi chose to appeal that decision by requesting a hearing Monday that spanned nearly five hours.
The commission in January took the unusual step of initiating closure midyear during winter break, after rejecting the school’s latest financial plan. The panel at the time decided to withhold approximately $187,000 in funds allotted for Halau Lokahi, and release only funding necessary for dissolving the school during the revocation process.
When funding stopped at the end of January, the school’s staff was effectively laid off, but five former teachers are volunteering their time at the school, where roughly half the school’s students continue to show up.
Charter schools are independently run under contracts with the Charter School Commission and report to their own governing board rather than the Board of Education.
The school’s financial troubles came to light at the end of last school year, when it ran out of money and stopped paying its staff and rent.
The school has since cut all ties to the previous administration, led by founding director Laara Allbrett, who was ousted in June. All of her relatives who were employed at the school were laid off or left in December, and the state attorney general is investigating suspected theft and money laundering during their tenure.
"The school has been transformed into a transparent, responsible, compliant, cooperative, community-engaged, standards-aligned, project- and place-based, Hawaiian-focused charter school," Halau Lokahi board co-Chairman Randy Shiraishi said at the hearing. "After becoming the victims of nepotism and severe mismanagement and potentially criminal spending, we believe that since the cancer has been removed from the school, there is no need to euthanize the patient."
During Monday’s special hearing, the school’s state-designated attorney called witnesses — including students, parents, former staff and governing board members — to help argue against the move to revoke the school’s contract.
School officials and parents implored the commission to let the school keep its doors open for eight more weeks to finish the school year and allow its handful of seniors to graduate.
"It seems, and I understand, that they’re looking at Halau Lokahi as an entity. Everything that happened from July till today is Halau Lokahi as an entity, which is very, very misrepresented, because we are a new school," said Elizabeth Blake, who was brought on last summer as a school improvement consultant and now serves as acting director.
She said that until Feb. 5 one of Allbrett’s daughters continued to control the school’s governing board, which has turned over five times since July.
"Any changes to fix the school, to make any changes was impossible," Blake said. "They had their claws in the school."
Despite the school’s funds being frozen, Blake has since implemented an academic plan that utilizes licensed teachers employed by K12 Inc. of Herndon, Va., to provide instruction online, and negotiated a long-term payment plan to eliminate back rent owed to the school’s landlord.
"In three months we did what people couldn’t do in the last five years," board Co-chairman Peter Terry said at the hearing.
During the hearing, commission staff laid out the statutory grounds for revocation, including Halau Lokahi’s failure to meet generally accepted standards for management, and significant concerns over violations of its charter contract and charter school law.
"Our point in flagging all of these issues today is not to transform today’s revocation hearing into another review of another recovery plan and all of its details," commission Executive Director Tom Hutton said. "From our perspective, we are really very long past the point where we can responsibly be vetting, debating and improving yet another school recovery plan."
He added that the commission "has repeatedly and patiently afforded this institution ample opportunities since May of 2014 to address its problems. … Nearly a year later, Halau Lokahi’s problems have not satisfactorily been addressed, and it is in everyone’s best interest at this point to move on."
The commission ultimately agreed to release approximately $36,700 per month for April and May, based on an updated budget from the school’s board.
Shiraishi, the Halau Lokahi board co-chairman, called the decision bittersweet.
"The fact still remains that next year there are no Hawaiian-focused charter schools that serve the Central Oahu core," he said after the vote.
The school could still appeal the overall revocation decision to the state Board of Education.
After the meeting, Hutton said that because the school was operating as a nonpublic school for part of the semester, it’s unclear whether students were earning academic credit.
"There are some questions that don’t necessarily go away by this decision," Hutton said.
"I think the commission was trying to balance a lot of very difficult considerations, and hopefully all the stakeholders in this can work together to find a way that allows the best outcome for the students for the rest of the school year but also minimizes the cost to the public, because this is a deficit situation," he added, referring to outstanding rent and possible vacation and sick-leave payouts.
