School assaulted by gang of kids. What happened?

[Rob Tucker]

Who knows the answer to that? The world we live in is full of surprises.

[dragon2k]

Well I was posing the question to the school teacher/administrator on this thread. Perhaps that person could share some insight as to the current state of race relations in our local schools.

[csgray]

D2K: "Oh yeah, everything that happened before 2006 is ancient history. What?" Exactly what question are you posing here? I must have missed it because it was hiding behind the snark. News is by definition NEW. I said this article was "old news" because, at roughly 8 years ago, it is.

There have been no similar events since that I know of, but that is no guarantee that some other set of drama driven adolescents with immature pre-frontal cortexes and poor executive function won't pull the same sort of stupid stunt again. There is plenty of drama driven bad behavior that happens at virtually every large middle and high school on this island, which can degenerate into violence. When this event happened, charter schools were fairly new here, now kids transfer back and forth between DOE and charter schools all the time, so I think this is less likely to happen now.

Keaau had a really rough start when they first opened the HS, multiple administrators changed out every year until finally the DOE got people in there who could control the situation and it seems much improved. Pahoa has had a reputation for a lot of student "scrapping" but most of this stuff tends to stay within a given school. Hawaii and Puna have been through a lot of changes over the past 10 years, this event may have just been a symptom of the adjustments to those changes.

The Public Charter school I teach at has a lot of security people who will confront anyone they don't recognize and ask them what their business is on campus, but they probably couldn't stop a herd of kids bent on jumping someone. No school has that kind of security, even the ones with cops on campus.

Carol

[rainyjim]

I feel like idiots like this deserve a permanent dunce cap when traveling in public.

I wonder how many of those jokers are on the police force now...

[dayna]

My 16 year old who goes to Keaau high just said:

"if I go looking for trouble, it's out there. But if I keep my sh*t to myself it's fine"

This is her second year at this school.

Kids here in Keaau are more likely to fight/scrap here than her school in Alaska, but in Alaska online bullying and girl trouble was a much larger issue than here.

She said people here tend to "deal" with their issues by "taking it outside" and when it's done its done. In Alaska issues and problems are dragged out in a public forum (the internet facebook etc) and caused much much more damage in the long run.

If she had to choose right now she'd choose to go to high school here. However she said if she was younger she thinks there would be more problems as even kids she knew last year are much more mature this year and fighting less.


edited to add: my daughter is white. If that means anything to anyone. She feels like she's any other kid at school. She's not singled out due to her color.


Dayna

http://www.FarmingAloha.com
www.E-Z-Caps.com

[unknownjulie]

This is only my own personal experience with my own children in the schools in Hilo. Within a couple months of moving to Hawaii from Texas, my oldest son in 7th grade, could identify people walking at a distance as either, "Micronesian", "Melanesian", or "Polynesian". I had never even heard of these distinctions and honestly I have a hard time telling what part of Asia that people are from. He had learned this almost immediately upon arriving here, as it was the way that the kids were described and grouped in the school- by the other kids. He did tell me that there were some fights along racial lines, but that the Caucasian kids are such a minority, that they are usually left out of it. He has experienced less teasing/bullying here- than in Texas. I think this is all very individual, and all three of my boys are very fair with blue eyes, and they are all happy here- with friends.
It is very interesting to note, that just as all Asians sort of look alike to me, that I think it goes both ways -and that the Haole's may all look alike to some Asians. When I go to the school I am often mistaken for someone else's mother, since there are only 3 or 4 Caucasian kids in the entire grade, I am immediately assigned to whatever Caucasian child is within sight.

[csgray]

I want to clarify that the attack on Waters of Life was not a local VS white thing. Waters of Life, like all the charter schools I've worked in here on the Big Island, had about the same ethnic distribution as the communities they drew their students from. It was someone with a beef against a specific person rallying a bunch of hot heads to charge into battle with her, it just happened that the person she was after was a student at Waters of Life, so that is where the fight went.

Carol

[ericlp]

Unprofessional for the police to just say go get your own security.

BS... What happened to protect and to serve? I'm really surprised no one sued the police department or state over this. I don't really care about the fights or what not. Shows total ignorance of the police department around here. If someone would have died in this stunt HPD would have got slapped with a big law suit for not doing their job!

[Midnight Rambler]

quote:

---

Originally posted by unknownjulie

This is only my own personal experience with my own children in the schools in Hilo. Within a couple months of moving to Hawaii from Texas, my oldest son in 7th grade, could identify people walking at a distance as either, "Micronesian", "Melanesian", or "Polynesian". I had never even heard of these distinctions and honestly I have a hard time telling what part of Asia that people are from. He had learned this almost immediately upon arriving here, as it was the way that the kids were described and grouped in the school- by the other kids.

---

Is this really all that surprising? In my elementary school growing up in Massachusetts, most of the kids were Italian, Irish, or Greek, and one could usually tell them apart pretty easily (certainly if you heard them speak, because each group had a slightly different accent even as third-generation Americans).

[hikatz]

Honolulu magazine does a great (yearly?) series about Hawaii public schools.
The local library will have a copy of this issue, which you can check out.

http://www.honolulumagazine.com/Honolulu...c-Schools/
http://www.honolulumagazine.com/HM_Mar13...eChart.pdf

http://www.honolulumagazine.com/Honolulu...ools-Safe/


http://www.hawaiipolice.com/affray-at-ch...u-03-17-06