Posted on: Tuesday, June 5, 2001

Punahou middle school will bear billionaire's name

By Beverly Creamer
and Shayna Coleon
Advertiser Staff Writers

Case: AOL-Time Warner president is 1976 graduate.

Twigg-Smith: $1 million gift will aid chapel renovation.

The family of AOL-Time Warner President Steve Case is donating more than $7 million to Punahou School to help pay for a revamped educational program for middle school — grades 6-8 — plus construction of several new buildings and renovation of two current ones.

Case is a 1976 Punahou graduate and his three siblings all graduated from the school. His mother, Carol, taught at the school for many years.

The middle school will be renamed Case Middle School and is expected to open in September 2003.

"We were planning to renovate Castle Hall and Bishop Hall and work within the existing buildings, but his gift transformed our level of thinking," said Laurel Bowers Husain, director of development for the school.

"It allowed us to step outside the box and think about what an ideal program would be and then think about what the building would be around it."

The ambitious plans call for refocusing education in the middle years by grouping students into "learning teams" rather than standard classrooms. Included will be Creative Learning Centers, flexible open spaces — such as rehearsal/ performance space and teacher-student workrooms — that allow collaboration and hands-on activities.

Architectural plans are expected to be finished by the end of the summer. Additional fund-raising will continue.

The school also announced that its chapel office will be renovated and an art pavilion added, thanks to more than $1 million from Thurston Twigg-Smith, a 1938 Punahou graduate who is former owner of The Honolulu Advertiser.

As part of the Case family gifts, Punahou has been helping coordinate the Power Up program in Hawai'i. It is a nationwide technology program that has already financed tech centers at 250 public schools across the country, and was created by the Case Foundation and Waitt family of Gateway Computers.

The first two Power Up centers in Hawai'i were opened last year at Boy's and Girl's Club sites next to Wai'anae Elementary School and Washington Intermediate. Each site has 20 computers and a VISTA volunteer who oversees instruction.

Punahou President James Scott said the tech centers will be linked with the school's new plans to create a center for public service, building on the volunteer work already required of Punahou students.

In announcing the plans Saturday at graduation ceremonies, Scott said students are already helping everyone from retirees to preschoolers to those in homeless shelters.

"But, we want to create a public and social policy with this center, where it goes beyond just service," he said. "It becomes one thing to work with the homeless and then create a policy where students question why people are homeless in Hawai'i."

Punahou seniors each must complete 36 hours of community service as part of a nine-week economics course. This year's senior class of 415 students completed service for more than 30 organizations, said Punahou spokeswoman Bonnie Judd.

Scott credited the graduating class with helping to provide inspiration for a service center.

"The senior class pledged to do something positive when they first set out to do volunteer work," he said. "But, this class went above and beyond in exceeding expectations this year. This type of leadership demonstrated the initiative we needed to build this center."

The center is scheduled to be operating by summer 2002.