By Jennifer Hiller
Advertiser Education Writer

State school officials were less than thrilled when they learned that nearly a quarter of Hawai'i public schools failed their fire inspections this year.

Half of the schools in the Maui District failed the inspections, while county fire officials found problems on 67 campuses.

But school board member Lex Brodie was even more dismayed to find that many school safety committees, which are supposed to deal with fire hazards and the like, don't seem to be meeting much.

The Department of Education requires schools to form safety committees, which are supposed to report quarterly with copies of their minutes.

It's a way for the DOE to make sure schools are complying with federal safety laws and requirements of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

But schools in the Central and Windward districts are the only ones as of May 30 to have turned in all of their safety committee minutes.

"If we're not in compliance with federal safety laws and we injure one person, the Felix consent decree starts to look like small potatoes," Brodie said. "It's very, very bad. A lack of supervision is just killing us."

The worst results came from the district offices, where all of the state's top education administrators worked. Just 29 percent of the district offices had anything to show from their safety meetings.

More than 40 schools and five district offices have no minutes on file.

While filing the minutes doesn't mean the schools have met safety requirements, Brodie said it is the only way the state office has of making sure schools are at least trying to address problems and stay on top of OSHA requirements.

Two of the Department of Education's top administrators are leaving, officials announced this week.

Rene Tarumoto, assistant superintendent of the office of human resources, is returning to the state Department of Human Resources Development, where she previously served as personnel program administrator in the Recruitment and Examination Division. .

Thomas Yamashiro, assistant superintendent of the office of information and technology services, will return to the private sector.

Educators across the country are awaiting a U.S. Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of school vouchers.

The high court is considering the case of a Cleveland family that wants to move their child out of public school and into a religion-affiliated school.

The authors of a study published this week hope their findings add to the voucher debate over whether sending public money to a private school is a good idea.

The Harvard Civil Rights Project study says that private and religion-affiliated schools are more segregated than public schools.

Researchers collected data from every private school across the nation and found that most of them are still struggling to become ethnically diverse. Because of the lack of constraints on private schools, the study's authors had expected to find the opposite.

With Hawai'i's already diverse population, private schools here have worried more about the challenge of making sure that their student bodies have economic diversity.

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