Editorial
Kamehameha Schools' plan offers advantage

The other shoe has dropped in the long struggle to reshape the image, mission and approach of the huge Kamehameha Schools charitable trust, formerly known as the Bishop Estate.

Under pressure from the courts, from the community and from the Internal Revenue Service, the structure and approach of the estate's management has been entirely reformed.

And now, in an announcement made formally yesterday, the trust's approach toward educating the Hawaiian population has been radically changed. But the new direction will not succeed without substantial cooperation from the wider community, including the public school system, other charities and trusts, public worker unions and the beneficiary families themselves.

Doing all this will be anything but easy. If Kamehameha Schools can pull it off, however, it will have converted itself into an entity that contributes far more, not just to the Hawaiian community but to the state as a whole.

Fundamentally, what Chief Executive Officer Hamilton McCubbin and his board of trustees have in mind is a 180-degree turnaround from the approach followed by the previous administration. The previous board was focused on the Kamehameha Schools on Kapalama Heights, which offers quality education to a relatively small percentage of eligible students.

Two new campuses, on Maui and the Big Island, were essentially to be extensions of that mission — a first-class educational experience for the relatively small number of students who were equipped to take advantage of the trust's huge resources.

While those campuses and their mission will remain, the broader focus of Kamehameha Schools will turn toward the educational needs of the 90 percent or more of Hawaiian children who have yet to be "touched" by the estate.

This includes supporting or creating accredited pre-schools in areas with high concentrations of Hawaiian families, partnering with the Department of Education to take over and upgrade public schools in Hawaiian areas and offering a variety of educational opportunities to both young people and adults in Hawai'i and on the Mainland.

In effect, the board is taking the approach that every Hawaiian with an educational need should be able to find some help or support from the trust founded by Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop.

It is a hugely ambitious undertaking.

As in all such endeavors, the devils will be in the details. And they are not inconsiderable details by any stretch.

For starters, this effort will require a great deal more of the estate's resources. The estate spends about $200 million a year today on its educational mission. Within five years, it could be spending as much as $250 million and that is far from the end of it. Where will the money come from?

Some will be generated by a change in investment emphasis, which traditionally has concentrated on preserving and enhancing the trust's "corpus." A changed investment strategy suggests more gain, but also to some degree, more risk.

Some will come from redirection of existing resources, which means some Kamehameha Schools programs will be scaled back. It also means the politically difficult task of raising tuition for those families who can afford to pay more.

Partnering with the DOE in the running of schools won't be easy. There are the obvious problems of working out matters with unions and DOE administrators. There are also issues of blending curriculum and standards from two different educational cultures.

And there is the tricky matter of ensuring that Kamehameha Schools' involvement truly ends up as value-added participation. The experience of our emerging charter schools suggests this won't be easy.

For instance, if Kamehameha Schools and the Department of Education get together to take over and upgrade a school in, say, Nanakuli or Waimanalo, there will be immediate pressure to shift "surplus" resources elsewhere.

Someone will surely argue that since Waimanalo is getting substantial help from Kamehameha, then some of Waimanalo's taxpayer resources should be shifted to other needy schools without a large Hawaiian population. At which point why would Kamehameha continue to put its money out if it did not see any added value for their beneficiaries?

But if this ambitious program succeeds, Kamehameha Schools will have accomplished a great deal. It will have vastly broadened its ability to meet the underlying mission set out by Mrs. Bishop in her will. And by creating a broadly based generation of youngsters who benefit from quality educational experiences, it will have contributed immeasurably to Island society as a whole.