The novelty of a hotel room, with the beach a short walk away … a vacation adventure in Waikiki!
But boarding a bus at 5:30 a.m. for a long, dark ride to school … a daily ordeal in Waikiki.
Hundreds of school kids have transitioned from there to here in the weeks their families have been displaced by the Red Hill water contamination crisis. They come from seven public schools in communities served by a Navy water system fouled by a fuel leak in the Red Hill underground tank system. Homes and schools in the area have been cut off from clean water, and there’s no definitive end in sight.
The schools serve 3,200 students who are coping in different ways. Some families have moved into hotels on the Navy’s dime and are making the long commute on buses provided by the military or by family car. Others are toughing it out at home, which carries its own stresses bringing in water for drinking, cooking and cleaning.
As this Red Hill story drags on, information tends to fly at us in terms of millions of barrels of fuel, billions of dollars to forge a solution, decades to play out. The big numbers are scary, but almost so huge as to be mind-numbing.
Consider instead several hundred young souls stumbling off to school in the early morning darkness. Because they can’t stay in their own homes. Because the water would make them sick.
It’s a human cost that can’t be overlooked in all the talk of emergency orders, national security, compliance, transparency, monitoring, defueling, enforcement and so on.
Teachers from the seven schools reminded us of the situation at ground level during an online forum sponsored by the Hawaii State Teachers Association on Monday. They spoke of children arriving tired, disheveled, hungry, sometimes late, often frustrated. They’re unsettled, not just by the disruption, but by the uncertainty of how long this in-between situation will go on. They spoke of having to deal with temporary water stations for hand washing, many set up by military personnel, but that may have to be refilled by a teacher out of water bottles.
A Hickam Elementary teacher said her school had a plan to upgrade outdated computers, but now, “too bad, we spent our money on trying to get safe water.” Reimbursement is supposed to come for costs incurred in the beginning of the crisis, but how much and how soon are among the many factors still hanging.
On top of the daily difficulties, there seems to be a real disconnect between the schools’ plight, and the support — or lack thereof — from state Department of Education leadership in understanding and mitigating conditions on the front lines.
Another example cited: Some affected school cafeterias still haven’t returned to regular meal service, despite what interim schools Superintendent Keith Hayashi told the school board last week.
DOE leaders must get a clearer picture of the hardships being faced by students and faculty, so that they can proactively allocate necessary funds, supplies and personnel to help these schools through this tough situation. As difficult as it’s been statewide dealing with on-campus learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, imagine layering on the added hardship of a prolonged water crisis. Learning losses at these schools must be monitored closely, with catch-up remediation launched if the losses are significant.
When all is said and done, if families no longer trust the water system and don’t want to move into the area, enrollment could decline, leading to lost teaching positions. They could lose good teachers for other reasons, one said. “Why would a teacher want to stay at a school where they have to fill water bottles?”
These students do have shelter, food and their schools, even as they learn a hard lesson never to take water for granted. But they shouldn’t have to endure so much for so long.
“The only certain thing is uncertainty,” a Hickam teacher said. When it comes to a resolution, they’ve been given estimates of a few weeks, to the end of February, to the end of the school year. That level of uncertainty is alarming — and DOE officials and legislators must do more to help these students, teachers and schools weather this crisis better.
