Hawaii’s DOE - First No Buses, now No Payroll!!

[terracore]

Have you ever been in a Hawaii school classroom?  For some teachers a raise is a good reason to continue  another year or two.  No matter how much they love the profession, there are a few students who can make it a challenge.

I was once asked by the DOE to give a series of talks in 11th grade classrooms....Seriously, they were the most undisciplined, most outspoken and in may instances vile kids I had ever encountered. Absolutely unbelievable. I would never, ever, work in that environment. And have a hell of a lot of respect for the teachers that do.

In 2013 our daughter was a 16 year old student at Keaau High School.  This was her assessment:

"My school caters to the stupid and the angry. There aren't any resources left over for the smart kids."

She wasn't exaggerating, they told her they didn't have any classes for her.  We had to start sending her to the community college, where she earned the rest of the credits she needed for high school (at our expense, of course).  She could have earned the credits at Keaau High, but it would have been a situation like taking an algebra course she'd already taken instead of learning calculus, etc.  That was her junior year.  When she was done with that semester they graduated her a year early as a Valedictorian. Since her last semester was essentially at the community college, she was done with HS a year and a half early.

She transferred to the school the previous year, having come from Alaska, and they tried to put her in "basic math".  She had already been through algebra and wasn't going to sit through a year of watching other kids learn to plus and minus, but her counselor wouldn't listen to her, so she went into the principal's office and told him, "I am NOT going to take basic math.  I can TEACH basic math."  She was her best advocate, and she was already pissed at him for denying her a transfer to Hilo High.  The irony was the following year, she was literally teaching basic math at KHS in a mentorship program.  Instead of basic math, they put her in pre-calculus, which the school didn't offer, so it was watching a classroom on Maui via skype.  The Maui teacher didn't consider her a part of the class, for that and other reasons she couldn't learn calculus watching pixelated video of a Maui classroom, so she taught herself by watching youtube videos.  Let that sink in:  she learned more watching youtube than in public high school.