Wish list for public schools long, costly

By Jennifer Hiller
Advertiser Education Writer

From preschools to up-to-date high school science textbooks, the list of wants — and needs — in the Hawai'i school system seems as long as the distance between islands.

Even if a tax hike to benefit schools were to pass, deciding where the money would go wouldn't be easy. The list of schools' needs and wants is long. Advertiser library photo • Sept. 4, 2002

It doesn't appear that the political will exists this year at the Legislature or in the governor's office to pursue such a tax increase. And there is an acknowledged gap between what people say they would do and what they actually will do when money is involved.

But the idea of finding more money for the public schools has some observers considering the cost of a better education, and just what money could buy.

With nearly 575,000 people who file state income tax returns, increasing taxes across the board by $100 would conceivably generate up to $57.5 million.

• About $1 million would add four computers to every regular school campus in the state; $5 million could buy 20 new computers for every campus, enough for a computer lab.
• Extending the school year would cost about $2 million per day.
• Buying four new textbooks for every regular-education high-school student in the state would cost $10.8 million. (This assumes that all textbooks cost $60 apiece, a lower-end cost for a high school text.)
• A $500 debit-card for school supplies or classroom materials would cost $6.4 million if one was given to each of the 12,857 teachers in the state; a $250 debit card would cost $3.2 million. Gov. Linda Lingle has talked about creating a debit-card system to cut down on out-of-pocket expenses for teachers.

Those numbers are just the beginning. It's easy for the price tags to reach into the tens of millions.

Lowering class size has been a major legislative goal of the Hawai'i State Teachers Association for years.

The union and officials at the Department of Education spent about five years lobbying at the Legislature before winning a 20-to-1 recommended student-teacher ratio for kindergarten through second grade.

To take that effort one step further and lower class size in the third grade, where the recommended ratio is now 26 to1, the DOE said it would need about 158 new teachers at a cost of more than $6.3 million per year.

Liz Chun, executive director of the Good Beginnings Alliance, said she would focus on the early childhood years to better prepare children for school. There are about 8,000 Hawai'i children ages 3 and 4 who live well below the poverty level and who are not enrolled in preschool programs.

Enrolling every one of those children in a quality preschool would cost $48 million per year.

Chun said the number is staggering, but noted that studies have shown that early-childhood education makes a difference in future academic success. Children are less likely to drop out of school, repeat grades or require special education.

James Schlosser, principal of Kalaheo High School, said having adequate textbooks has been a major issue on his campus.

Textbooks, in short supply at schools across the state, have also been a sore point among parents and students as it has become increasingly common for teachers to use class sets. That means students can only use the books while they are in that classroom and cannot take them home to study. Ideally, schools prefer to assign books to each student for the year.

"We just said that's how we're going to focus our money," Schlosser said. "We had a quite a few courses where there were only class sets. We tried to prioritize. If a class used a textbook every student would have their own."

The school has directed its extra money toward the effort and had cobbled together money to reach that goal, but it hasn't been easy. New high-school level textbooks can range from about $40 at the lowest end to about $90 for an advanced science text; a literary anthology costs about $60.

Because the school says it's a basic educational need, every student at Kalaheo now has a set of textbooks.

The DOE budget is about $1.3 billion this year. The bulk of that — $776 million — goes to instructional costs, about $270 million in special education, about $506 million in regular education.

For years, the quality of education has been rated as one of the top concerns of Hawai'i residents, but the Hawai'i Poll is the first broad survey of public attitudes toward a tax increase for the benefit of public schools.

If Hawai'i simply wanted to bridge the gap between its $6,775 per pupil spending this year and the national average of $7,524 per pupil, it would cost the state an additional $136.9 million per year.

"That's just bringing it up to a national average," said Jim Shon, associate director of the Hawai'i Educational Policy Center at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa. "Even if you had an extra $200 per student, that's enormous. Just keeping one's head above water is a pretty tough goal for (Superintendent Pat Hamamoto), though."

Of course, Shon noted that the public would need assurance that the extra tax money would stay in education.

"The capacity is there," Shon said. "The trust is not."