Schools taking low-key approach

By Jennifer Hiller
Advertiser Education Writer

At Mokapu Elementary yesterday morning, the 800 students who attend school on the Kane'ohe Marine Corps Base may have awakened to the start of a war, but they arrived on campus to find the arrival of another regular school day.

At Mokulele Elementary at Hickam Air Force Base, students were treated to a band performance from a visiting school and looked forward to the start of spring break, but didn't have any assemblies or formal classroom discussions about the war in Iraq.

While the war will be used as a living history lesson for many students across the state, schools that serve high numbers of military students — many of whom have parents serving overseas right now — are trying to create a sense of safety and routine for their children.

"Right now we are playing it down," said Mokapu principal Larry Biggs. "If they have questions we address those. We're trying to address their needs and at the same time create a sense of normalcy."

The campus has instead focused on the families, holding meetings and spaghetti dinners to let parents know about the array of community services available to them through the Marine Corps while fathers or mothers are on deployment. "We want to get across to these families that they are not alone," Biggs said.

Mokulele principal Richard Nosaka said his students, 99 percent of whom are from military families, have likely already learned about the war from their parents. "The moms and dads do talk about this with their kids. They know about the possibility of deployment," he said. "It's part of the resiliency that military children have. They know what is possible."

Instead of talking about the war, the school will focus on making sure that counseling services are available for students who need them.

An added benefit of the 1994 federal Felix consent decree, which ordered the state to improve the special education system, is that a whole crew of counselors and behavioral health specialists is on campus now, Nosaka said. The school has also worked closely with military officials and Tripler Army Medical Center to provide teachers with information.

The state has nine schools on military bases, dozens more with high populations of military students and more than 15,000 military families attending public schools. Most of the military schools were closed for a few days following the Sept. 11 attacks, but all of the schools that were not on Spring Break yesterday were open and reported no problems with traffic getting onto the bases.

Greg Knudsen, Department of Education spokesman, said the department anticipates that at some point during the war there could be a disruption to the schedules of military base schools. But with spring break scheduled next week at nearly every public school in the state, and about half of the schools in the first week of a two-week break, Knudsen said they hope the disruption will be minimal.

At Solomon Elementary School at Schofield Barracks, teachers are working to create a normal learning environment, but also are looking for warning signs of distress among children who have parents who are deployed or on alert that they may have to leave soon.

"The high school students can relate this to history lessons and other things," said Solomon principal Linda Yoshikami. "For us with the younger kids, we're going with the flow. I think our parents need to be the first line of information. If students have questions we answer them honestly and factually."

At Sacred Hearts Academy, which has some military students but not a large number, high school students did talk about the war in class discussions. In Joe Gardewin's U.S. history class, students took a day-long break from lessons on the civil rights movement to watch the latest updates from CNN. They talked about the terror warning codes, the countries that supply Hawai'i's oil and gasoline and asked questions that were difficult or impossible to answer.

"How did we go from the whole thing with Afghanistan and al-Qaida to Iraq?" asked Sascha Baldwin, 16.

"I'm not worried about Saddam and his crew," said Dayna Doughty, 16. "I'm worried about the people who have to leave their families and their homes. What will happen to them?"

Doughty said she had watched an MTV show about a Kuwaiti family that had suffered from the Iraqi invasion in the early 1990s, and now thought about how Iraqi families would be affected by the war. "They're just regular families," she said. "They're teenagers like us, but they live in a place where there's war."

"What if they drive Saddam Hussein out of his country. Where would he go?" asked Vanessa Antonio, 16, as the entire room of normally chatty teenagers was stumped by her question. "How about France?"

The class also discussed possible targets of terrorism, but decided that Hawai'i was an unlikely target.

While there has been no specific threat to Hawai'i, schools across the state have been updating their security and emergency plans. Response plans, similar to those developed for natural disasters or industrial accidents, include options such as locking down schools, using shelter-in-place or evacuating campuses.

Many schools are designated as civil-defense shelters and could serve as vaccination centers if immunization against biological agents was required, the state superintendent has said.

Lorraine Henderson, principal at Kailua Intermediate, said the schools have been updating their emergency contact lists and doing emergency drills.

"We're a family," Henderson said. "We're going to watch out for each other when we're here during the school day."