As the search for the next permanent state superintendent of Hawaii’s public school system comes to a head Thursday, some say it will boil down to this: Which finalist will benefit the keiki most — the lauded mainland education administrator who can bring new perspectives, the career Hawaii educator with an extensive state-level leadership resume, or the local education veteran who already has served as interim superintendent through some of the toughest moments of the pandemic?

Caprice Young, Darrel Galera and Keith Hayashi are the finalists vying to head Hawaii’s massive state Department of Education. The state Board of Education is aiming to settle on one nominee for a final vote of approval that day.

Hayashi and Young spoke with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser recently, and Galera responded in writing, to discuss why they want to lead Hawaii’s public schools.

The job is huge, and there is much at stake. As the nation’s only statewide school district, Hawaii’s is widely considered the 10th largest in the nation, with 171,000 students and 42,600 employees in 257 regular public schools and 37 charter schools, and an annual operating budget of more than $2 billion. The salary is up to $250,000 per year, less than many comparable mainland positions.

The next permanent superintendent will have to lead Hawaii’s schools not only in addressing student learning loss, social-emotional trauma and rampant absenteeism resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, but a plethora of other issues. Among them: making effective use of nearly $1 billion in pandemic aid, easing the chronic teacher shortage, mending rifts with the Hawaii State Teachers Association, monitoring school water safety in the wake of the Navy’s fuel contamination crisis, navigating often- conflicting governance of the schools, and evolving curriculum so that graduates meet the future needs of Hawaii, the nation and the world.

The superintendent selection process this time is more transparent than ever. A 2019 Hawaii Supreme Court ruling and changes to law now forbid boards and commissions from holding closed-door sessions unless they can prove a legitimate privacy interest.

All three finalists will be interviewed publicly, with their merits discussed openly by the board, in a special public meeting of the state Board of Education starting at 8:45 a.m. Thursday that will be devoted solely to the selection process. All proceedings will be streamed live via WebEx, which also can be accessed from the board’s website.

The board has made public the finalists’ full resumes and cover letters to the board, along with their written responses to questions, evaluation feedback from an advisory group of stakeholders, and a predetermined list of live-interview questions.

The public is invited to testify on the candidates. To sign up to present oral testimony live or online, and find the portal and procedures for submitting written testimony, visit the board website at boe.hawaii.gov.

Here’s a brief look at the finalists:

KEITH HAYASHI

While Hayashi acknowledges that the nearly 10 months that he has worked as the state’s interim superintendent have been rough on him and the schools at points, he still wants to be the person to lead them out of the pandemic.

In fact, he feels an upswing for the schools and himself is just getting started.

“I think this is a very exciting time in public education. Every school I visit has had this energy,” the former Waipahu High School principal said in a recent Star- Advertiser interview when asked why he wants to continue on as the permanent state superintendent.

“Everyone … is bringing their efforts together, all in the name of supporting our schools. There’s this excitement, this buzz — you can feel it when you walk the campus. They’re glad to be back in school, working together, helping to move the work forward.”

Hayashi became interim superintendent in August 2021, after Christina Kishi­moto stepped down at the end of her four-year contract, and it was just as the state’s public schools were finally coming back to in- person learning amid the surge of the delta variant of COVID-19. Then the omicron surge struck in the winter.

Hayashi has found himself at odds with the public and the teachers union at times for insisting that the best thing for students has been to keep the schools open and continue protective masking in order to maintain in-person learning, and that schools and school complexes should have the power to decide if a temporary shift to virtual learning was needed.

Hayashi still stands by those decisions, and feels they’ve paid off as modest gains in academic and social-emotional areas for students are starting to show.

He says now is not the time to interrupt any budding momentum with another major change in leadership.

He disagrees with those who say that making a longtime DOE employee like him the permanent superintendent would be a vote for the status quo in the schools. In fact, Hayashi says his decades working in the Hawaii DOE have allowed him to forge relationships and cooperation on every level that will be crucial as the schools work to heal. “You watch … we’re going to show monumental gains as we move forward,” Hayashi predicts.

CAPRICE YOUNG

Young says that even though critics will point out that her life and career up to now have unfolded on the mainland, she feels a strong connection to the islands through her parents, who have lived in Kalihi since the 1990s, loved Hawaii from decades before, and raised her with local values.

And if Young is selected to lead the public schools here, she says, “I would come to it with humility and respect. And no pretense that someone who has not been raised in Hawaii can truly understand without really focusing on learning.”

Young has headed massive school organizations before, including the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school district in the nation, which enrolls approximately 500,000 students.

Young, who now heads an educational consultancy in California, said she can bring great ideas from her past roles. “But they would not be meant to replace something that’s great coming from within Hawaii. … It’s not about (coming from) outside being better, or bad. It’s really, how do we keep keiki first?”

Observers who have wondered whether Young would favor charter school or voucher models have her wrong, she says. “I love all public education. I have worked in both the charter schools and the traditional public schools. … It really is my dream to serve a public school system, because I believe every school can be brilliant.”

To help students recover from learning loss of the past two years, Young said, the key is to capture not just their minds, but their hearts. “Students and adults have felt very traumatized by the last couple of years of pandemic. We have to attend to everyone’s mental health needs. We have to create that culture of malama (caring). If we have that, the kids will come back, and teachers will regain their equilibrium.”

Encouraging project- based and experiential learning that allows students to use all the academic disciplines to solve a problem will help, she says. Examples include robotics programs, kupuna programs that invoke cross-generational wisdom, and the Get Lit program she’s involved with that encourages kids to turn classical literature into spoken word, then write their own cathartic poetry.

“In the last decade, the strategic plan has been centered around excellence and equity. I would add a third: engagement,” she said. “Engaging students, teachers, families. That engagement is how we’re going to recover from the pandemic.”

DARREL GALERA

Depending on who you ask, Galera’s past membership on the state Board of Education and close friendship with Gov. David Ige give him an unfair advantage in his quest to become state superintendent, or give him a wealth of knowledge and connections that could be valuable to the schools if he gets the job.

Questions raised by critics about those connections compelled him to drop out of the running for the state superintendent job in 2017. However, Galera said in an email last week to the Star-Advertiser that he felt cleared to apply again after no ethics violation was declared.

“For my own assurance that any complaint about an alleged unfair advantage was not a violation of the State Ethics Code, I initiated a meeting with the commission staff so that they could investigate,” Galera wrote. “Subsequently, I received the following from the State Ethics Commission: ‘We are writing to inform you that we have completed our investigation and did not discover evidence to support a charge against you for a violation of the State Ethics Code.’”

Galera, who works now as a leadership consultant for the Hawaii Center for Instructional Leadership, declined to be interviewed Friday, citing a full work schedule, but answered questions from the Star- Advertiser by email.

He said he wants to become state superintendent so that he can put to use his skills and experienced gleaned as a career educator and administrator with 40 years’ experience, as well as a lead architect of the 2017 school-reform plan called the “Hawaii Blueprint for Education,” which evolved from a President Obama-era effort to give the states more power to innovate and strive for excellence in their schools.

“It is purely about serving, giving back, and the concept of taking what is given to you and making it even better,” Galera wrote. “As our team traveled around the state to create the shared vision that is now the ‘Hawaii Blueprint for Public Education,’ I was asked, ‘Will this just sit on the shelf and collect dust?’ My response, my promise, was that I would do everything possible to make the vision of the Blueprint a reality.”

Galera added that the pandemic “has made it clear that the world is changing and will continue to change very quickly, and our school system needs to be agile and (to) better adapt to prepare our students for their future and not our past. We need to embrace a system that promotes innovation and leadership that anticipates change instead of merely reacting to change.”

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MORE ON THE CANDIDATES

DARREL GALERA

Age: 63

Main job: Instructional leadership consultant & Gallup-certified strengths coach

Education: Certified as Gallup-certified strengths coach; certified professional school administrator, state Department of Education; Master of Education in educational administration, University of Hawaii at Manoa; Bachelor of Education in secondary social studies, UH Manoa

Awards/accomplishments include: Former state Board of Education member; various leadership positions in state Department of Education, including deputy district superintendent, Leeward Oahu district, and Moanalua High School principal; chairperson, governor’s Every Student Succeeds Act team; leader, Governor’s Emergency Education Relief plan group; Hawaii State Principal of the Year

Hometown: Honolulu

Currently lives: Ewa Beach

Children: One grown child attended public school; one child is attending public school

Classroom teaching experience: 9 years — Moanalua High School

Hawaii connection: Born and raised in Hawaii; graduated from Waipahu High School

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KEITH HAYASHI

Age: 57

Main job: Interim superintendent, state Department of Education

Education: Master of Education, educational administration, University of Hawaii at Manoa; Master of Education, curriculum and instruction, UH Manoa; Bachelor of Education, elementary education, UH Manoa

Awards/accomplishments: Various leadership positions in the DOE, including interim deputy state superintendent, Pearl City/Waipahu complex superintendent and Waipahu High School principal; Shirley B. Gordon Award of Distinction, Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society; Hawaii High School Principal of the Year, National Association of Secondary School Principals; Masayuki Tokioka Excellence in School Leadership Award, Public Schools of Hawai‘i Foundation

Hometown: Kaimuki

Currently lives: Central Oahu

Children: Two daughters

Classroom teaching experience: 8 years — Lehua Elementary School teacher, Leeward District resource teacher

Hawaii connection: Born and raised in Honolulu; graduated from Kaimuki High School

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CAPRICE YOUNG

Age: 56

Main job: President, Education Growth Group, Calif.; recent national superintendent, Lifelong Learning and Learn4Life Schools, Calif.

Education: Doctor of Education, University of California, Los Angeles; Master of Public Administration, University of Southern California; Bachelor of Arts, history, Yale University

Awards/accomplishments include: California State University Los Angeles K-12 Educator of the Year; former CEO and Superintendent of Magnolia Public Schools, Calif.; former president of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education; National Charter Schools Hall of Fame

Hometown: Los Angeles

Currently lives: Los Angeles

Children: Three adult children — two attended public high schools, and one took high school equivalency exam

Classroom teaching experience: Taught for one year in a Job Training Partnership Act program for public high school students.

Hawaii connection: Parents have lived in Kalihi since 1995; father is a retired minister, mother was a special education teacher in Hawaii schools. Youngest brother graduated from Farrington High School.

Hawaii Board of Education Report on Superintendent Search by Honolulu Star-Advertiser on Scribd