By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

One secret of getting things done in Hawai'i is The Island Way. The law works, up to a certain point. Bureaucracy has its limits. When all else fails, there's The Island Way.

A shining example is the splendid solution Schools Superintendent Pat Hamamoto has found to solve the problem of forcing kupuna to go to college under the No Child Left Behind Act.

The law is supposed to raise educational standards. But like all one-size-fits-all regulations, it sometimes throws the baby out with the bathwater. In this case, it's the elders who go to classrooms to share cultural knowledge. If those kupuna quit, how can we replace them? The cost of training teachers with their knowledge would be prohibitive.

So Hamamoto has reclassified the kupuna as "cultural personnel resource to the department." Now they can keep on being kupuna without going to college. It's all perfectly legal and painless and to everybody's benefit. That's The Island Way.

I first ran into this technique after we saved the Falls of Clyde from being sunk as a breakwater way back in 1963. Everybody from first-graders to bank presidents contributed better than $38,000 to bring the old girl back from Seattle.

The mortgage and harbor fees had come to $19,000. Preparing the ship for a tow cost $10,000. The tow itself would cost maybe $15,000. That didn't count restoration. It appeared that harsh reality had caught up with the dream.

Then a marine surveyor, Bill Thebedeau, evoked The Island Way. He dropped in on his old friend at Pearl Harbor and said, "Admiral, you have a seagoing tug, the Moctobe, about to sail from Seattle. It's highly illegal for the Navy to tow a civilian vessel. But a training exercise might be in order, say, towing Falls of Clyde to Honolulu."

"Bill, a training exercise is exactly what we need," said the admiral, who had been in Hawai'i long enough to recognize The Island Way.

Here's another example. John Ortiz in Kalihi has a friend on the Mainland, James Daugherty, who came to Hawai'i in the Navy, then worked at Pearl Harbor. Daugherty discovered when he moved to Casper, Wyo., that a clerk had misspelled his name on his Hawai'i marriage license.

His wife can't get an ID to prove that she's his widow if he dies unless the name on the marriage license is corrected.

For two years he tried to get the bureaucrat at the marriage license bureau here to change the "o" to an "a." "You'll have to pay $200 to get the paperwork done," grumbled the bureaucrat. Daugherty hired a lawyer. Same response.

Finally Daugherty wrote to his old friend, Ortiz, in Kalihi. Ortiz called the marriage license bureau. A kindly lady answered the phone. "What's Mr. Daugherty's address? I'll send him a new marriage license," she said.

That's The Island Way.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.