05-27-2013, 05:52 AM
quote:
Originally posted by csgray
Hawaii is unique because the entire state is one district, run out of Honolulu. Neighbor Islands are sometimes treated like an afterthought and there is very little of the kind of local control seen on the mainland.
Pahoa is the neighborhood school for Nanawale so that is the one school that "has" to take your son, you can apply for a geographic exemption for a school that is not your "home school" but I don't know how they allocate those exemptions. Not everyone who applies gets the exemption, for HS there is something about programs not offered at your neighborhood school (like ROTC) but you should call the complex office in Keaau or Hilo and ask how it works.
Carol
The short answer is, they don't give an exemption. We tried to get our daughter an exemption because Keaau HS doesn't offer any of the programs she needed. In order to get an exemption you need a "yes" from the losing and gaining principal and the one in Keaau said NO. One is left to wonder if a school that is on probation for low test scores would EVER let a 4.0 student out of their clutches...
If you want your child in a specific school you will need to have documentation showing that you are domiciled within that school's zone.
In our case the refusal had a good ending. As a sophomore she took all the AP, honors, and other "senior" classes the school offered so they have no choice but to graduate her a year early.
A quote from my daughter regarding her High School: "Our school caters to the stupid and the angry. There aren't any resources left over for the smart kids."
It's not all bad, however. Except for a couple of incidents she says there is less bullying here. And she has more friends at her Hawaiian school than she did before. Unfortunately because of the classes she was taking all of her friends have graduated so she has to "start over" in that respect next year.
You are wise to plan ahead. In our case we planned a "worst case scenerio" where she couldn't attend public or private High School (a friend of mine on the Kona side had to send his son back to the mainland to finish high school). She took her SATs after her freshman year and fortunately scored high enough to get into the university, our backup plan was that if she couldn't go to high school in Hawaii she would get her GED and go directly to the university.