By Jennifer Hiller
Advertiser Education Writer

Who says Hawai'i isn't big?

When it comes to enrollment per school, the Aloha State outsizes nearly all the others.

Secondary schools in Hawai'i have the third-largest average size in the nation, with 1,334 students. Only Florida and California have managed to create larger campuses.

Hawai'i's elementary schools are super-sized as well, with 610 pupils on average. But as a result of school construction the past few years, Hawai'i's size ranking at the elementary level has dropped from fourth to sixth nationally.

Still, according to the Superintendent's Annual Report released last week, Hawai'i's secondary schools are 75 percent larger than the national average; the elementary schools are 36 percent larger than the national average.

Hawai'i has been part of a national trend toward larger schools over the last century.

Prior to 1925, the academic literature encouraged districts to build larger schools and shut down smaller ones.

The reasoning was that by consolidating the administration and other tasks of a school, the per-student cost would drop. It was also thought that the curriculum would become richer as the size of the school and the number of teachers increased.

Most school districts around the country went with this philosophy, building larger and larger schools.

But more recent studies of school size have shown that smaller schools have better student attendance, satisfaction and extracurricular participation than larger schools.

Mary Anne Raywid, a professor emerita of administration and policy studies at Hofstra University and an affiliate faculty member at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa, has written that it is rare to find empirical evidence justifying the large high school.

Raywid notes that most of the research now focuses on "how big is small?" and how to define the successful characteristics of a small school.

The Rural School and Community Trust, a nonprofit foundation that tracks school facilities issues across the country, has sponsored research showing that smaller schools help poorer students improve achievement on standardized tests.

And a Kentucky school district recently decided to limit the size of schools based on the number of students receiving free and reduced lunches, a common measure of the poverty level of a school's population.

On Kaua'i, Kapa'a Elementary, a high-poverty campus that has met its academic goals the past two years, has found a similar solution.

Kapa'a's 1,000 pupils are divided into seven separate schools-within-a-school. Parents and children can choose from tracks that range from Hawaiian-language immersion to a program that emphasizes hands-on learning. Officials say it makes for a small-school feel, even though it is complicated to coordinate.

With many of Hawai'i's schools, particularly those in Central O'ahu, overflowing with students and going to multi-track scheduling because of crowding, other schools may begin trying to break their schools into smaller learning communities, too.

In regard to school size, bigger doesn't always mean better.

Reach Jennifer Hiller at jhiller@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8084.