EDITORIAL
Local school boards not the only solution

Perhaps one of the clearest lines in the sand between Linda Lingle and Mazie Hirono in their contest for governor was over the state school board.

Lingle wants to replace the single statewide school board and statewide Department of Education with seven locally elected boards governing seven districts. Hirono was against the idea.

Since Lingle won, presumably her idea will now be tested in the Legislature.

While it makes for an interesting debate, our hope is that this issue does not become the dominant education argument in the early days of the Lingle administration.

Governance is important, but it is not the central issue facing our school system. Instead, it is getting more resources to teachers, more resources into the classrooms and improving the interaction between individual teacher and individual student.

These are matters than can succeed or fail no matter how the governance of the school system is organized.

It is our belief that Lingle's proposal for the seven boards is really a way of responding to a core feeling in many communities that the education system — the bureaucracy, if you will — is simply not responsive to their needs and desires.

There's plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest this is true. Parents who get worked up about a local issue at a school in, say, Lihue, often cannot get their concerns resolved at the local level. It often turns out that they are confronting statewide policy or decisions made at the central state education office in Honolulu.

So Governor-elect Lingle has her finger on a legitimate problem. But rather than battling over the difficult constitutional issue of tearing up our statewide system and replacing it with local systems, why not work toward the same goal within the process we already have?

In fact, that process is already under way. Superintendent Pat Hamamoto has decentralized many decisions and a considerable amount of authority from the central office — and even district offices — to individual school "complexes," those constellations of a high school and its feeder middle and grammar schools.

There's no reason this process, spurred by enthusiastic support from the governor's office and the Legislature, could not go further.

In addition, it's time to revitalize the school/community-based management system so that it returns to its original purpose, which was to let community stakeholders (families, local leaders, local businesses and others) have a real say in how individual schools are run.

In too many cases the SCBM council became a useless appendage or an organization dominated by only one of the many groups that should have been involved.

Empowering communities to have a real stake in, and commitment to, their local schools is a worthy goal. It shouldn't have to take a constitutional battle to make it happen.