Hawai'i Department of Education

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The Hawaiʻi State Department of Education is the most centralized and only statewide public education system in the United States. The school district can be thought of as analogous to the school districts of other cities and communities in the United States, but in some manners can also be thought of as analogous to the state education agencies of other states. Established by Kamehameha III on October 15, 1840, it is the oldest school system west of the Mississippi River and only system established by a sovereign monarch. As the official state education agency, the Hawaiʻi State Department of Education oversees all 283 public schools and charter schools and over 13,000 teachers in the State of Hawaiʻi. It serves an average of 182,798 students annually. The HIDOE is currently headed by Superintendent Patricia Hamamoto.

1 Structure
2 Relevant debates
3 Network setup
4 School lunch(es)
5 Schools
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Structure

There is one individual school district that is directly controlled from Honolulu by the fourteen members of the Board of Education: Central District, Hawaiʻi District, Honolulu District, Kauaʻi District, Leeward District, Maui District, and Windward District. Thirteen members are directly elected by the voters of either Oʻahu or the Neighbor Islands to staggered four-year terms. The remaining member is a public high school student selected by the Hawaiʻi State Student Council who serves as a non-voting member.

The Board of Education is empowered by the State Constitution (Article X, Section 3 [1]) to formulate statewide education policy. The Board also has the power to appoint the Superintendent of Education as the chief executive officer of the system. The Superintendent reports to and can be terminated by the Board.

The State Department of Education currently carries suggested benchmarks for each educational grade and subject which are available on its website. However, a law creating a standard state public school curriculum, the first of its kind in Hawaii, did not pass during the 2006 legislative session.

[edit] Relevant debates

Probably the most current and controversial debate over Hawaiʻi school reform has to do with the structure of the State Department of Education: specifically, whether it should remain centralized or be broken into smaller districts. The main rationale usually given for the current centralized model is equity in distribution of resources: all schools are theoretically funded from the same pool of money on an equitable basis. (Most schools on the U.S. Mainland are organized into school districts funded from local property taxes; thus more affluent school districts theoretically receive more money and resources than less affluent areas.) Supporters of decentralization see it as a means of moving decision-making closer to the classroom, and thus achieving better student performance.

The debate divides roughly along party lines, with Republicans generally supporting decentralization and the Democrats supporting the centralized status quo. In 2002, Republican Governor Linda Lingle ran on a campaign to reorganize the Hawaiʻi State Department of Education into smaller school districts that were localed modeled after a system found in Canada. The Democrat-controlled Hawaiʻi State Legislature, however, voted not to enact this plan in 2003 and 2004.

In January 2004, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich wanted to create a system similar to that of Hawaiʻi in his state but met fierce opposition from local school boards who did not want to lose control. Michigan also has discussed unifying their school districts and faced similar opposition.

[edit] Network setup

The Hawaiʻi Department of Education provides a shared Sprint OC3 (via cable modem) internet connection for certain schools on the island of Oʻahu. Each school is dependent upon the NSSB (Network Services and Support Branch) for general layout and design. Schools are required to maintain and operate any hardware or software not essential to the overall network.

School computers are commonly assigned DHCP IP addresses in the ranges of 172.17.224.1 to 172.17.227.255. Static addresses for network hardware, printers, and servers are in the range 165.248.77.1 to 165.248.247.255. Speculation exists that the HIDOE has exhausted its pool of addresses, but according to the NSSB this statement is false.

Recently, the company Websense has been hired to manage content-filtering of internet traffic. The filter is able to block many common websites that have been submitted to the service as potentially unwanted content. Methods to bypass the content filters are widely available and effective for most purposes. Since the installation (and recent renovation) of the Websense service, school internet traffic may experience delays of up to 25 seconds.

Most internet-enabled devices on the school networks are outdated mostly due to lack of funding and the HIDOE's usage of legacy software such as MacSchool which requires the school's faculty to use the outdated Apple OS/9. Recently, the HIDOE has begun using a system called ESIS developed as a Java web-applet based on a design from Cisco Systems.

[edit] School lunch(es)

Standard lunch fare is an offering of either the "Main" lunch, or a "Wiki" lunch as an alternate. Most schools have recently begun to use the new federal lunch-purchase system. The new computerized system is called "MealTime" and uses student IDs to determine the amount of "lunch-credits" a particular student has.