EDITORIAL
Kamehameha trustees need beneficiary trust

If there is one lesson the current board of trustees for Kamehameha Schools should have learned from the previous board, it is this: Don't operate in a vacuum. The alumni, parents and students of Kamehameha are passionate about the school and expect to be consulted when important decisions are made.

A perceived reluctance to listen was a key factor in the previous board's downfall. It lost the confidence of trust beneficiaries.

So the current board should not have been surprised to be greeted with an uproar when it announced it admitted a non-Hawaiian student to its new campus on Maui. The board insists there has been no change in admissions policy — simply that there was an extra vacancy after all qualified students of Hawaiian ancestry had been admitted.

But clearly, the beneficiaries read the situation differently. At a stormy meeting Monday night, they lashed out at the trustees and in fact called for resignations.

The current trustees, to their credit, didn't follow the path of the previous board. They submitted themselves to tough criticism, apologized profusely and promised that this kind of situation would not happen again. That kind of healing, open approach is precisely what is needed.

But clearly, the beneficiaries continue to feel they haven't been given the whole story. And who can blame them?

The trustees insist there has been no change in policy and that the preference will continue to be for students of Hawaiian ancestry. Rather than "opening the floodgates" to more non-Hawaiian students, the trustees say the Maui experience will probably result in a surge of qualified Hawaiian applicants that will make it unnecessary to consider non-Hawaiians.

Fair enough, but then what to make of comments such as those from trustee chairman Douglas Ing, who told the beneficiaries it might be necessary to "give up a pawn here and a pawn there" in the battle to protect the admissions policy against constitutional challenge?

Trustee Nainoa Thompson also told the beneficiaries that the decision to admit the non-Hawaiian should be seen in the context of the many lawsuits challenging the school's admissions policies and its tax-exempt status.

Kamehameha Schools will have great deal of work to do in the years ahead as the pace of legal challenges to Hawaiian entitlements picks up. Whether it will succeed is anyone's guess.

One thing is certain: If Kamehameha Schools is to succeed in its mission of educating Hawaiian children to be our next generation of leaders, it will only do so if all the stakeholders, from top trustee to youngest student, are in the fight together.