“MMy slippahs broke, Auntie Kat!” Cady says, giggling as she holds up the black rubber flip-flop, its thong ripped away from the sole. “I knew they were close. They never last more than two years.” Her smile radiates, her eyes twinkle.
Kathleen Hoppe, director of Kamaile Academy’s Navigators’ Center, laughs. “Well, get some new ones, then!” She points to the racks of supplies — toilet paper, stacks of rubber flip flops, girls underwear in plastic bins carefully labeled by size, canned food, blankets, whatever her staff has collected and logged. “You know where they are, there on the shelf.”
“If a kid’s slippahs break,” Hoppe explains, “we know they don’t have new ones at home, so we have them here.” She sends Cady back to class, new shoes on her feet. “These kids, they’ve got enough to worry about. And getting new slippahs, that can be hard for them, for their parents. They don’t want to disappoint, to make anyone mad.”
Hawaii kids grow up with two absolutes: sand between their toes and rubber flip flops, or “slippahs” as they’re called, on their feet. In any given neighborhood, a pile of slippahs by the front door means there’s a pot of stew and a bunch of friends inside. For some kids, slippahs are the only footwear they have. At Kamaile Academy, a PreK-12 charter school, the Navigators’ Center is the school’s in-house triage center, bridging the gap between the community and the kids, making sure the students have what they need to learn. Some days it’s a pair of shoes. Other days, it’s a whole lot more.
Kamaile sits off the highway, inland from the Waianae Boat Harbor on Oahu’s leeward coast, an hour’s drive and a world away from Waikiki’s landmark beaches and palm trees. Farrington Highway starts where the freeway ends and stretches the length of the coast, past Ko Olina’s manicured resorts, the power plant that fuels the island, and the landfill that buries its garbage. The only way in or out, the lone highway meanders through small communities almost forgotten — Nanakuli, Maili, Waianae, and Makaha. The end of the road, Kaena Point, sits a few short miles but no paved road from Haleiwa, Pipeline, and Sunset Beach, Oahu’s famed North Shore surfing destinations.
“The politicians, they forget everyone past the power plant,” old-timers say.
Most people, locals and visitors alike, rarely top the hill past the plant. Generational poverty plagues the region’s families, many of whom are native Hawaiian. Most kids receive free or reduced school lunches, and housing struggles and homelessness loom large. Living-wage jobs are hard to find.
Yet, there’s something else here too, amidst the difficulties and the isolation. Look closely, beyond the grit and tough façade. There’s community — strong, closely knit, fiercely protective. There’s resourcefulness and resilience. Family is sacred — the one you’re born into and the one collected along the way — and everything revolves around the kids. Folks here don’t take “no” easily; they’ve heard it too many times. Instead, they figure out another way.
Schools teem with hands-on, innovative programs, many home-grown and created from necessity, lifting students out of their immediate realities and offering opportunity, hope. Virtually every school tends its own organic garden and works with local farmers to learn native Hawaiian cultural and farming practices. The Coast’s performing arts program tours nationally with its kids, raising money through penny-pinching and fundraisers. Kids learn how to tell their stories through creative arts, especially photography and videography.
Hawaii’s first in-school, hospital-run medical clinics are dramatically reducing absenteeism, stemming ER visits, delivering vaccinations and catching behavioral problems like depression, anxiety and suicidal tendencies. One of the nation’s only mobile preschools pulls into homeless encampments every day, offering lesson plans to kids and career training and services to their parents. The region’s preschool enrollment is among the highest in the state, and a group of women from the Institute for Native Pacific Education and Culture (INPEACE), informally called the “Auntie Brigade,” goes door to door, looking for infants, toddlers and preschoolers in need of care and education. The aunties get the kids placed and registered, and then they provide much-needed services and information to the families.
PPerhaps it’s because of the difficulties and isolation. Micah Kane, CEO of the Hawaii Community Foundation and trustee of Kamehameha Schools, knows Hawaii’s needs and resilience well. His Hawaii roots run deep, growing up on the more prosperous windward side of the island while spending weekends, summers and holidays with his grandmother and uncles on the Coast. He attended Hawaii’s legendary Kamehameha School, established in 1887 by a private charitable trust endowed by the will of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, a member of Hawaii’s royal family, so her people would have the benefit of education for generations.
Kane calls Hawaii the world’s largest village community. “San Diego has L.A. to lean on. Portland has Seattle,” he says. “When we lean, we fall in the water.” That self-reliance is rooted deeply in Hawaii culture. Ancient Hawaiians had no concept of land ownership and instead divided the islands into ahupuaa, pie-shaped pieces running from the mountaintop to the ocean’s shore. By including in each piece access to fresh water from the mountains, fertile farmlands in the central regions, and ocean access for fishing, the system ensured each ahupuaa’s residents had everything they needed. Then there’s aloha. Not the word plastered on tourist brochures, but the strong local culture of aloha spirit. The word translates loosely to “the breath of life,” and even in today’s hustle-bustle world, it features prominently in local vocabulary and actions — a sense of connection, love, awareness, kindness to others, shared joy and shared pain.
“Aloha is at the center of everything we do,” Hoppe says, about the Navigators’ Center. Formally established within the school in 2011, the Nav Center, as it’s called, takes a holistic approach to education. Kids can’t learn if they’re hungry. They can’t get to school without shoes. And their families won’t support kids’ schoolwork if pressures of housing, paying bills and putting food on the table already overwhelm them.
The school’s “aha” moment came in 2001, when a family found themselves homeless. The staff banded together and gathered tents, blankets and information on community resources available to the family. Over time, the mother started getting resumes out, the father got a job, and soon after, they got a home. “That’s when we realized it,” says Lovelyn Ampeloquio, the Nav Center’s events coordinator and “Auntie Love” to the school community, “The gap between our school and our families. Our school can do so much more.” The school soon opened its doors to homeless families after the last bell, allowing them access to showers and washers and dryers. “The parents need guidance and support,” says Ampeloquio, and when the school became that outlet, the results were game-changing. “The families trusted us,” she says. “And when they trust you, they’ll follow you anywhere.”
Kamaile considers trust and respect the basis of everything they do.
“If a student comes to me with their problems, that means they trust me,” Hoppe says. “When they trust me, I can make a difference.” Cady, whose last name is being withheld because of the sensitive nature of her family’s story, understands that trust. A high school sophomore now, she’s been at Kamaile as long as she can remember. She recalls her teacher pulling her aside in kindergarten, telling her she’d missed 147 days that year. Neglected by parents she says were doing drugs, she’d hide under her bed in the morning and then hop the fence in the afternoon to join the other kids walking home after school. Her parents didn’t notice, but her teacher did. “She offered me extra time on the Wii or pizza if I came to school,” Cady remembers. There, she found friends, a safe haven, a place to get the clothes she needed. “I’d been growing up in all that partying,” she says, “But at school, everyone loved me, hugged me.” Soon she became the kid asking for extra homework, doing book reports that weren’t assigned.
“Our students are capable, intelligent and resilient,” Hoppe says, noting that the stereotypes of kids in poverty and the realities can be quite different. Her hot button? “Teachers who come out here, blame the kids for their lack of success and leave,” she says. Kamaile’s teachers, like those all along the coast, do much more than teach. They listen to the kids, keep a close ear on the community and learn what to talk to the kids about, what’s going on in their lives. They grapple with poverty and what it means, the stress it creates. “I don’t know what these kids face,” Hoppe says, “But I try to empathize, understand.”
That poverty-induced stress became clearer for some when Kamaile’s faculty and staff participated in a poverty simulation program last year hosted by Waianae Neighborhood Place, a nonprofit that helps families navigate the system, find resources, get on their feet. Thrown into a simulated “family,” participants have to figure out everything that needs to be done — get electricity, apply for assistance, find a homeless encampment that’s safe, get on the list for the government-supplied cell phone (the lifeline for most of these families). There are no instructions. You figure it out. Many participants are overwhelmed. When they fail at their task, they let down their simulated family. “Someone cries almost every time,” says Barbie Lei Burgess, the program’s coordinator.
For Cady, like many of these kids, the cycle ebbs and flows. Soon her little brother came along, and, she says, with her parents high, no one made sure he started school. Cady helped where she could, but it was too much. Eventually she told her teacher. Soon, Cady says, state officials were knocking on the family’s door. “I was scared we’d be taken away,” Cady says. “I had my mom and dad, and when they weren’t smoking, they were there for us.” Cady’s father landed in mandated rehab, according to Cady, while her mother struggled to manage the children and her own addiction. Once her father came home, her mother started a day program, Cady recalls. “When she quit, it made me proud,” Cady says. “She did it to save her marriage and her family.” With her parents clean and sober, a phrase Cady uses a lot when talking about life on the Coast, Cady and her brother now feel safe. Cady believes Kamaile teachers intervened. If you think it destroyed the family’s relationship with the school, think again. “At some point I asked about going to Waianae High,” Cady laughs, “and my mom said, ‘No way! You’re staying at Kamaile.’ My mom loves this school.”
OOriginally a public elementary school, Kamaile struggled to meet the state Department of Education’s metrics for student achievement. Rather than overturn the model they’d created for kids and families, they became a charter school in 2007. They’ve grown every year since, eventually adding middle and high school, and now count some 900 students in PreK-12. They graduate a class of around 50 seniors every year, some of them touting acceptances and scholarships to places like Notre Dame and other mainland universities.
About a mile in each direction, Waianae Intermediate and Waianae High Schools educate many of the rest of the region’s kids, many facing the same challenges. Native Hawaiians originally arrived on Hawaii shores in double-hulled voyaging canoes, each paddler doing his part — steering, navigating, bringing the muscle, facilitating the turns. It’s no surprise, then, that the story of the canoe, and the critical importance of working together, doing your part and paddling in rhythm, is an enduring metaphor still.
In Waianae, everyone’s in the same canoe; there’s no other way to lift up these families and teach these children.
Mention Candy Suiso and everyone up and down the Coast lights up. “Auntie Candy!” Hoppe says. “She was my high school Spanish teacher!” A force of nature within the community, for decades Suiso has been on the front lines of finding solutions where others see none. In her early teaching days, she found herself teaching Spanish at Waianae High with only a moderate grasp of the language herself. She needed a way to motivate her students, so she brought in her Betamax video camera (state-of-the-art at the time) so students could record each other speaking Spanish. “I realized filming was the hook,” she says. “It was hands-on, fun.” At year’s end, she told the school’s principal she was founding a video production program at the school. Now, more than 20 years later, SeaRiders Productions is widely considered a gem in the Coast’s crown of accomplishments, receiving awards for their gritty productions and their dedication to creative arts in education.
Suiso and Dr. Vija Sehgal, chief quality officer and director of pediatric services at the Waianae Coast Comprehensive Health Center (WCCHC), found their connection years ago while drinking wine at a conference on the mainland, according to Sehgal. Realizing they were fighting many of the same problems — no health literacy, bad personal habits, absenteeism due to chronic health issues — Suiso and Sehgal teamed up. WCCHC already had a dental clinic at Kamaile that provided regular screenings, treatments and cleanings, so it made sense to go deeper into the schools to reach more kids.
“We attended community meetings and we heard a consistent message,” Sehjal says. “People said, ‘You sit up there on your hill, but you’ve got to come down here.’” While the center was bustling with patients at its sprawling campus nestled in the hills above the highway, Sehgal realized they were losing kids when they hit puberty.
They got down off that hill and it worked. Today, WCCHC-staffed medical clinics operate every day in Waianae Intermediate and High schools and Kamaile’s dental clinic is running at full speed. Another school clinic and an off-site Teen Services Clinic (primarily for family planning and reproductive health) are in the works.
The medical clinics just completed their first year of operation in the schools, with numbers that support their founding premise. More than 2,000 kids sought medical care, with 90 percent of them returning to class that same day — reducing absenteeism and curbing emergency room visits that had previously handled chronic conditions like asthma or injuries like sprains. The clinics also successfully intervened with several actively suicidal students, caught a case of appendicitis before it became dire and established relationships with students dealing with emotional distress and anxiety.
AAt the Waianae Boat Harbor, the island’s largest homeless encampment is tucked under the kiawe trees separating Waianae High School and the marina slips. Cloaked by the thick woods and surrounded by makeshift fences, the encampment of over 200 people is largely invisible to those traveling the highway or coming in and out of the Harbor. But the community knows it’s there, and everyone from the WCCHC staff to the state’s homeless services director has Twinkle Borge’s number in their phones.
Borge is the self-proclaimed leader of the encampment, setting rules, making sure people keep the place neat and tidy, assigning captains to the different areas of the camp and being a resource when one’s needed — which in her line of work is daily, hourly. Borge’s first priority: the children. “We have rules,” she says. “Every kid has to go to school every day. And I get on their parents if they don’t.” Borge opens her tent to kids whose family situations are too dire, currently housing 17 kids and providing at least one meal a day to almost 30. “I asked some kids one afternoon what they were having for dinner and they laughed,” she says. “I went to bed thinking about those kids not having food every night, so I got up the next day and decided I’d feed them.” She’s been doing it ever since. The Harbor kids know the drill: they go to school every morning, then return to Borge’s tent at the camp for a snack and to do their homework under her watchful eye. Then maybe they go to the beach, or play, or do chores before returning to her tent for dinner.
“They ask me what’s for dinner, and sometimes I wonder, too,” Borge says. “But the community always comes through.”
Back at Kamaile, Cady talks about her situation being better than that of some of her friends. “My good friend is homeless,” she says, “And I remember when we were almost homeless. I always tell her, ‘You’re a smart girl! I love you.’” She remembers the struggles of her family members, her auntie who went missing and Borge helped find her, and an older woman who moved in for a while, becoming an important grandmother-like figure in Cady’s life and then leaving again, pulled away by the lure of the crack pipe.
Cady’s also tuned in to the larger reputation of the Coast. “I’ve got social media,” she says. “I know kids on the other side of the island make fun of us, call us ‘Waianae dumb,’ think they’re better than us. It makes me mad, but it motivates me.” She gets quiet for a moment and then continues with a determination, a fierceness. “I’m going to college and then I’m coming back here and will say to them, ‘I’m from Waianae and I went to college. What are you doing behind that phone?’”
If her grades are any indicator, she’s right on track. She says she has a 3.7 GPA right now, and credits her English teacher for the kick-in-the-pants to excel. First, Cady’s papers came back covered in red ink and suggested edits. Then the teacher kept asking her to help other students. “I was so irritated,” she says, “but then Ms. Cruz pulled me aside after class and said, ‘You’re amazing. I know you can do better.’”
Cady’s motivation — that fierceness — is rooted in the community. When Kamehameha Schools opened its Community Learning Center in Maili a few years ago, providing shared space for student and family programs, their 12 preschool classes were immediately filled to capacity with more kids on the waiting list. “The community is hungry for excellence,” says the Center’s director, Kalei Kailihiwa. “We underestimated their appetite for excellence, giving them services instead.” She talks about their first algebra camp, held over the summer to help kids catch up so they would be ready when school started again. “How many 7th and 8th graders want to do algebra camp in the summer?” she says, laughing. But they did, and then some. The camp immediately filled, and on graduation day, the University of Hawaii showed up, offering conditional acceptance letters to the graduates, inspiring them to keep working. “Families came to graduation with balloons and lei, like they do at big graduations,” Kailihiwa says. “Everyone was crying.”
KKamehameha School’s CEO Jack Wong understands the power of the Coast’s community. Kamehameha’s tentacles reach every island, every corner of the state, and he knows from experience that top-down solutions rarely work. “All the answers we need are here,” he says, pointing to the many groups that work with his organization at the Early Learning Center. “We need to partner with them and figure out how to make it work.”
Those 12 preschool classrooms were the beta test. Only two of them are Kamehameha classrooms; the other 10 house preschools run by various nonprofits already in the community. “We tend to want to over-engineer,” Wong laughs, “But instead, we got out of the way and let the teachers figure it out — the parking, the playground times, the drop-offs.” It works. When Kailihiwa gets a call about a child needing placement, she finds the classroom that has an opening, one that’s a fit with the family’s needs. Wong understands that his work along the coast extends beyond the native Hawaiian community. “We have an obligation to our Princess to serve her people,” he says, referring to the conditions of Pauahi’s will, “But we need everyone in the community, and we don’t leave people out.”
Cady starts 10th grade this fall, and with it comes the tribulations of the teenage years. The boy she liked kissed her, and then she discovered on social media he already has a girlfriend and was cheating on that girl with Cady. She dumped him, but it still hurts. Sometimes kids taunt her when she walks into class, saying “Earthquake!” in reference to her body type. It gets her down, but the little kids, the ones she mentors and hopes to teach one day, lift her up. “I was crying one morning at school,” she says, because of the boy who hurt her. “And then this little guy comes over and points to another little guy and says, ‘Jayden says you’re beautiful and he loves you.’ This little boy came over to help me. It made my day.”
Cady wants to be a teacher, maybe for little ones like Jayden, or maybe middle school kids. “I can shape them before they get to high school and make all the mistakes,” she says. She’s also a prolific writer, creating song lyrics, poetry and stories based on her life. She rarely shares her work, but one day at school she shyly pulls the black binder and composition book from her backpack with that tentative fear every writer knows when showing their work to strangers.
I remember I saw them fight
I remember him hit his wife
I remember their love fade away
I remember the last hug he gave
I saw him walk to the door
I remember her fall to the floor
My brother chased him to the car
It was over…They got sober
It was for the better they sweared.
Yeah.
“I look back at my old writing and see how much I’ve changed,” she says. “It makes me feel super accomplished.” She tucks the notebooks safely away. Her big smile returns, and she talks about her mom now, how she’s always happy, upbeat and working at Costco, and how her little brother is in fourth grade and runs at her with a big hug when he sees her on campus. “My home life is more secure now. I come to school happy,” she says.
Lunch ends and the Wii music cranks, Who Let the Dogs Out? rattling the rafters. Kids flock to the center of the cafeteria to dance. Joe Wat, the Food Corps worker tending the school’s garden, wanders through with a flat of plants. “Growing vegetables and kids, that’s what we’re doing here,” he says. “Can’t get far without those two things.”
Two little ones grab Cady’s hands and she’s on the floor with them, moving, laughing.
