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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, July 6, 2003

Jury-duty wait turns into lesson on serving your community

By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist

The long hours were bad enough, but it was the Christmas wreath that just about pushed Lori Phillips over the edge.

Phillips was called to jury duty in Honolulu Circuit Court two weeks ago. She sat in the jury room along with about 70 other prospective jurors waiting for the selection process to begin.

They waited. And waited. "Every couple of hours, someone would come in and say it would be 20 more minutes. And then four hours would go by," Phillips said.

And all the while, she kept looking at that Christmas wreath. Finally, she asked the court staff what was up with the out-of-season decoration.

"They basically said they had asked for the wreath to be taken down but it had never been taken down."

After a day-and-a-half of waiting, Phillips and the other prospective jurors finally got to see the inside of a courtroom. After all that waiting, Phillips wasn't picked to serve.

"The judge did such a great job of explaining how people had to serve our country and we looked out the window at Punchbowl and thought of all the people who had died for their country and we felt we were called to jury duty to serve our country. I felt so guilty for being eliminated I thought, well, there has to be some good that comes out of this."

Phillips thought again of that Christmas wreath in the jury room, of the worse-for-wear walls, and of the values she tries to instill in the kids she teaches. She came up with a plan that she presented to one of the courthouse staff members.

"And so I said how about if I take the wreath down and I get you the art of the students at Palama Settlement who are in an alternative learning center funded by the judicial system? And so then she said well, she thought she might be able to get it done in the next month and I said no, no, I'll hang these by four o'clock today."

Phillips has her doctorate in education with an emphasis in using art to teach other subjects. She is the director of the PREL Pacific Center for Arts and the Humanities in Education and teaches art to 22 students at the Palama Settlement.

She picked up the pieces by the Palama students — watercolors and drawings. She also picked up some paint. By the end of the afternoon, the art work was framed and installed, the wall in the jury room was painted and some misplaced acoustical tiles on the ceiling were slipped back into place. And yes, the Christmas wreath was gone. Mission accomplished. Country served.

The next step is to bring the artists to see their work on exhibit.

"We're going to bring the kids down to the court," says Phillips, " the very court system that put them where they are, and show them the exhibit. I think when they see their art framed, they're going to see the end result of what they did in the very place where they started. And I think that'll be really cool."

So after hours of waiting, getting frustrated by the system, and fretting over that Christmas wreath, Phillips re-learned the lesson she has been trying to teach her students:

"It's the same thing as we tell our kids: Quit complaining. Figure a way to make it better. Don't complain about the stupid Christmas tree wreath. Figure out how can you make the situation better, and do it by 4 o'clock. Don't do it in a month, do it now."