Strike affects dozens of student activities
By Suzanne Roig
Advertiser East Honolulu Bureau
From speech events to band performances, dances and proms, schools around the state have juggled schedules or cancelled activities outright while Hawai'i public school teachers are on strike.
Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser
More than 400 students from 31 schools had been planning on attending the annual Chevron Honolulu District Elementary Speech Festival this morning at Kalani High School, now sidelined. Students have spent months preparing, memorizing words and gestures in groups and alone for the festival.
Parents find alternatives for children Nine-year-old Dylan Hays looks up at his mom, Gina Karas, as she signs him and his sister, Irish Hays, out of temporary daycare at the Kokokahi YWCA. Both children were unable to attend school because of the strike by Hawai'i public school teachers.
"We were hoping for a last-minute settlement," said Lilian Chang, one of the organizers. "This is the 13th year for the festival. It's one of the unfortunate consequences of the strike. I know the kids are disappointed."
That's putting it mildly, said Leiney Rigg, a 9-year-old Kamilo'iki Elementary fourth grader. She's been working on her rendition of "The Dream Tree" for months. Passages are stuck to walls and mirrors around her Hawai'i Kai home. For the past month, she spent every day at school working on the passage.
"We were crossing our fingers that they wouldn't strike," Rigg said. "It's great that we don't have school, but this is so sad. It was all like, 'Please, please, don't let the strike happen.' "
Kamilo'iki students received another blow when the principal decided to delay a fourth-grade class trip to the Big Island that had been planned for April. Now it will be in May, said principal Dorothy Pertz.
The biggest disappointment, Pertz said, is that the school's 15 speech students won't be able to perform at the speech festival. To make up for it, the school will host a reading of the school's performers at 10:30 a.m. Saturday at Starbucks in the Koko Marina Shopping Center.
At Kaiser High School, students have been planning for a junior prom in the school gym for most of the year. It will be held, strike or no, April 14, said school Principal Gayle Sugita.
Before the strike, teachers, administrators, parents and students came up with a plan for the prom, Sugita said.
"I gave the students the go-ahead when the strike was looming," she said. "The prom will go on with or without a strike. the parents have been supportive and are working hard with the students, and the administration will be supporting it as well."
Parents will step in and chaperone, while the school's safety manager, who isn't a teacher, will oversee the security. Athletic director William vonArnswaldt will oversee the decorations in the gym.
Despite the planning, students are feeling the strain, the Kaiser principal said.
"It's unsettling and disruptive," Sugita said.
At Waiakea High School in Hilo, principal Judith Saranchock doesn't want to have to cancel the senior prom for her 453 students, but if the strike continues, she will have to. The prom, at the school's gym, is supposed to be April 14.
"It just wouldn't be right to hold it there if there is a strike," she said. "The students are nervous and anxious. But we haven't cancelled it yet."
