The grim news about how far behind Hawaii’s public school children have fallen after more than a year of remote learning was hardly unexpected, but that doesn’t make confronting the reality any less horrendous.

State Department of Education (DOE) officials announced on Thursday that fall testing data showed three-fourths of the the state’s 163,000 students were at least one or two grade levels behind in math, and two-thirds were also behind in English language arts.

Keith Hayashi, interim superintendent, told members of the state school board that it will redouble its efforts to deploy the $412 million in pandemic relief funds authorized for Hawaii in the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). This, he said, is paired with the DOE commitment to “accelerating learning.”

That’s not all that requires acceleration. The DOE needs to present the Board of Education with a fully formed plan for accomplishing this — and fast.

There are undoubtedly models to consider from among the department’s 256 public schools. There was one encouraging example administrators held out to the board at last week’s meeting: Wheeler Middle School, scoring in the 99th percentile of schools nationally.

Its faculty has been stable, which certainly helps, and the teachers track academic progress and meet daily to share ways to improve, according to Principal Brenda Vierra-Chun. Wheeler also benefits from extra federal funding due to its high complement of students with military parents.

Not all of these advantages are replicable, but the availability of the ARPA funds to all schools should bring some new strategies within reach.

They can’t be applied uniformly, of course, because some school populations need concentrated help. Micronesian children, for example, tallied only 9.4% at grade level in language arts and 5.2% in math. Among Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders only 20% and 15% were where they should be in English and math, respectively.

Ideas from much farther afield, where schools face similar problems, could be instructive as well.

In 2020, the research organization Center for Reinventing Public Education reviewed experiences of schools recovering from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and found some of those lessons can apply to learning loss now.

High schools post-Katrina tried an accelerated approach called “spiraling” to avoid class boredom. Students first would “spiral” through prerequisites they’d missed before returning to the more engaging, current material.

That likely works better for older students, who have their fundamentals, however. The ones in greatest peril of disengaging, falling hopelessly behind, are those in first and second grades. COVID-19 had put them into remote learning when learning the basics begins.

The third-graders had the benefit of a full year of in-person kindergarten instruction and did much better, said Phyllis Unebasami, deputy superintendent.

Unebasami identified a crucial aspect of a recovery plan: enlisting family members in the work. Native Hawaiian students are among those who are especially family-oriented, she said.

Providing all parents and guardians with tools to help work with their children must be part of the plan, especially for the youngest students. Some of these resources will be online, so it is gratifying to know the recently enacted infrastructure law will provide federal funds to improve internet connectivity, especially for low-income families.

The realistic expectation of educators is that addressing this significant learning loss will be a multi-year project. The recovery phase will stretch out even further unless the work begins right now. Hawaii owes this much to its children.