State of Hawaii, Department of Education

Sad, pathetic building to accurately represent how your children will turn out if they attend public school with these money grubbing paper pushers as their advocates. Every worker in this building should be required to volunteer 3 hours a week at a local preschool, kindergarten, or middle school, so they will know what the reality of education is. Instead punching the clock and waiting for their retirement to kick in.

I don’t go to many prisons. I used to go to school in Joliet near where the prison used in the Blues Brothers was filmed and where James Bolshoi was let out from prison in the opening scene and Dan Akroyd was there to pick him up was on our bus route to get to school. There was a sign, «DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHICKERS!»
Even there in Joliet Federal Prison is a friendlier environment than I feel visiting the State DOE office downtown.
The office is so antiseptic. You need a photo id to even get in the building. Really– to talk to the people in charge of our Keiki education we need to prove that — what? We live in HI? We have a license? We need to check in with you to go talk to someone?
Are you so far removed from the Aloha culture that you need more barriers?
Again– making the Hawaiian language illegal wasn’t enough in our state history to show the disconnect between our education system and the people it is supposed to be an investment in for civic community building? OK– we get it — no aloha.
I was an AmeriCorps VISTA Leader here on Oahu and had worked with some of the administration at near the high levels. Some of the staff really are truly trying to make a difference for the Keiki in Hawaii. But then there are the other paper pushers, looking and counting the days til retirement and doing as little as they can possibly do and not get relocated.
I’m not bashing our education system but trying to highlight the fact that our state spends about 10% of the budget on ADMINASTRATION. Even New Jersey and it’s continued corruption that is highlighted in the news and called out on the blatant corruption is only at the national level of 2~3% of Administration costs. What I suggest is close endless bureaucracy and put that «MISSING» 7% of the total cost of the budget back into classroom teachers to reduce the size of our classroom– which is pretty much the most cost effective way to improve keiki reading scores by third grade. Reduce all classrooms to 10 students per class in grades under third grade or pay for STATE preschool with the ‘missing’ 7% of the total costs of education.
Yes, there needs to be at least 1 physical office for the DOE. No it does not need to run up the cost of education so that our keiki have less teachers physically in the classrooms.
So– 1 star for the depressing décor and 1 star for the amount of money that could be more effectively used as in classroom teachers salaries so that classroom size is reduced which increases performance and reading ability way more than any curriculum specialist.
1 star for how depressing the building is compared to prisons.