Posted on: Monday, September 3, 2001

Time to put Ma'ili air conditioning on fast track

There is something simply painful and wrong about the glacial — if that word can be used — pace of the project to air-condition Ma'ili Elementary School.

Parents, students and teachers associated with the Leeward Coast school made news last year with a poignant and effective lobbying campaign to win air conditioning for the school.

The aging facility is located on a hot, dry section of the island and is surrounded by pig and chicken farms. The result: Classrooms that are almost unbearably hot with all the windows closed and pestered with dust, flies and farm smells when the windows are open.

Lawmakers and Department of Education officials became convinced that Ma'ili deserved air conditioning, both in the classrooms and in the cafeteria.

Some $3.1 million was appropriated 17 months ago but the project is still a long way off. The best hope is that it will be finished by August of next year but it could be as late as December of next year before it is finished.

True, this is not a project that could be done overnight. Electrical systems have to be upgraded and other improvements made to make the school ready for an air conditioning system that was not envisioned when it was first built.

But the placid, one-thing-at-a-time pace of this project adds additional misery to a school that has been through enough already. Plain and simple, about half the students who were at Ma'ili when the project was first approved will be gone before the air conditioning is turned on.

If this were a private operation and the heat, dust and smells were driving away customers, you can bet things would happen a great deal faster.

It's time to put this project on a fast track and give the students at Ma'ili Elementary something more than a distant hope.