State schools Superintendent Christina Kishimoto leaves her post at the Department of Education at the end of the month and plans to launch a new initiative focused on helping women and communities of color affect public policy in Hawaii.
Kishimoto expects to launch Voice for Equity in a week or two to create access for marginalized communities to directly influence policy, whether through leadership positions on public or private boards or in government, she told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
In her role as the head of the DOE, Kishimoto often found herself as the only woman, or one of only a few, at the decision-making table.
“My passion is really about moving forward and preparing leaders who are in seats and future leaders to be policy leaders — women to be a policy voice — and to open up opportunities for communities that are struggling to be more engaged in having their own policy voice,” Kishimoto said.
“Otherwise, we ended up with biases, and we see those.”
She noted that many women have had to delay rejoining the workforce as the state reopens from the COVID-19 pandemic, due in large part to the lack of affordable child care — a long-standing problem in Hawaii well before the pandemic began last year.
“We know that, and we’ve known that for years and we talk about it every legislative session,” Kishimoto said. “We’re coming out of this pandemic with less public pre-K seats than we had before we started the conversation. So we have a problem.”
Equity has been at the forefront of Kishimoto’s vision for Hawaii’s school system since she was appointed superintendent in August 2017.
That issue became more acute over the past year and a half as COVID-19 forced students into distance learning, exacerbating connectivity challenges for the state’s most vulnerable students. The lack of connectivity created a “homework gap” between students whose families have the resources to obtain computers and internet access at home and those who do not.
“DURING THIS year they couldn’t even participate in learning without the DOE providing devices and connectivity for families,” Kishimoto said. “I think one of the big policy questions is whether by virtue of enrolling in the public education system we have to provide both connectivity and a device and that becomes a right that a student has, just like they have a right to textbooks and materials in the classroom.”
Using federal COVID-19 relief funds, the DOE was eventually able to get students the needed devices, but shipments were delayed for months as schools across the country scrambled for technology, creating months-long backlogs. Kishimoto hopes the department will continue to hone distance-learning models to give students more options.
A full, standard distance-learning option will not be administered by the DOE this upcoming school year. After having principals poll families, Kishimoto said only about 1% to 5% preferred their children to distance-learn. Because the need is so low, the department is leaving it up to individual schools to work with parents to accommodate distance learning requests.
During the pandemic, Kishimoto cited a “governance breakdown” among the Board of Education, the department and the state Legislature as one of the more difficult aspects of her job.
BOE members are appointed by the governor and hire the superintendent. The Legislature allocates state funds to the DOE, but the BOE decides how they’re spent.
Kishimoto felt the relationships got scrambled during the pandemic. Instead of answering to the board, Kishimoto felt pulled by the Legislature, the executive branch and county leadership.
“The Legislature called me in for a number of hearings and COVID-19 conversations, and were having lots of direct conversations about funding — where we were spending it, what the impact was — and it started to get into the details that I really should be talking to the board about,” she said. “It did feel this year like I was reporting to three different entities and that they were not necessarily coordinating with one another around who was responsible for which layers of work.”
The result was bills passed by the Legislature such as House Bill 613, which mandated that the DOE use its federal relief funds to recoup teacher salaries instead of student services the department planned. Gov. David Ige ended up vetoing it.
Going forward, Kishimoto hopes that the DOE will focus on innovation, which was put on the back burner during the pandemic.
In particular, Kishimoto hopes to see a computer science program for elementary school students and more culture curriculum about different ethnic backgrounds.
She also emphasized the need to continue to offer different types of schooling for students to accommodate different needs, such as tutoring at night and weekends when families are at home.
“We still want students — whether they’re high- achieving or they’re highly struggling — to succeed in the exact same school design,” Kishimoto said. “The child who’s struggling will never have equitable access if we don’t have more flexibility in the systems designed for that young person.”
Waipahu High School Principal Keith Hayashi will replace Kishimoto at the end of the month as interim superintendent.
Kishimoto leaves her post excited for the future of Hawaii’s public schools.
“I could see that greatness for us around the corner,” she said, “(but) I think we need to be honest about putting on the table those policy impediments that keep us from going there. And part of those policy impediments is recognizing where there are inequities that need to be solved.”
