Shrugging off safety and liability concerns, the state Board of Education tonight voted 9-0 to make surfing an official high school sport.

The decision means that Hawai'i becomes the first state in the country to sanction surfing, a sport that has been part of Hawai'i’s history and culture since ancient times.

Earlier today, a Texas-based testing company acknowledged errors on the 2004 Hawai'i State Assessment but nevertheless promised the board it would deliver rock-solid test results requiring no retesting.

After the unanimous vote to sanction surfing, a full house of Maui surfers applauded, along with Kahuku High School teacher Iris Kahaulelio, who has been urging the board to sanction the sport for years.

"But now the work has just begun," she said.

Prep surfing supporters must persuade school administrators, athletic directors and the Hawai'i High School Athletic Association to jump on board. The BOE policy does not obligate the interscholastic leagues to have surfing as a sport, and three of the five leagues that make up the HHSAA would have to agree to sponsor surfing before it could be recognized as a state championship event.

Kahaulelio said supporters must also organize volunteers and seek out private-sector funding.

Under the policy, unsanctioned surfing teams currently organized by school can now use the school name. They can also form a school club and have a school advisor.

The board appeared ready to approve the policy last month, but some board members had expressed reservations, saying the Department of Education should look at a broader ocean-sports policy.

Board chairman Breene Harimoto was one of them. But tonight he said he changed his mind, in part because of the commitment and passion of the surfing community, including some Kahuku surfers who drove two hours through congested traffic to attend the board’s last surfing discussion.

"It’s been an emotional issue," agreed board member Denise Matsumoto, who continued to urge a water sports policy to cover future requests by supporters of other ocean activities.

The DOE has estimated that surfing would cost $2.6 million a season if lifeguards on watercraft were used for meets and practices, and $1.2 million without lifeguards. Board member Garrett Toguchi urged the supporters to start lining up private sector for financial support.

In California, some school districts have recognized surfing as a sport and schools compete against each other in competitions, but the California Interscholastic Federation does not sanction surfing statewide.

During an earlier presentation on the 2004 Hawai'i State Assessment, officials with Harcourt Assessment Inc. of San Antonio, Texas, reported 45 "potential issues" in the materials used to test public students in the spring, but said only one error occurred among "live-test" questions that counted. The rest were "field-test" questions and mistakes in the directions, including typos and missing punctuation.

Company officials said they will conduct an analysis of the testing data in the next few months to ensure the results are valid and that the results will be delivered to Hawai'i on time by Aug. 1.

John Tanner, Harcourt vice president of testing services, said the company has taken full responsibility for what happened and has moved to improve its test-preparation procedures.

"It absolutely will not happen again," he told the board at '?ao School.

Harcourt has a five-year, $20 million contract with the state Department of Education to prepare the test. Each year students in the third, fifth, eighth and 10th grades take the test to measure whether they are meeting state standards in math and reading.

The test has taken on added importance in recent years because results are used to determine whether the schools meet annual goals under the federal No Child Left Behind law, with aid money and other consequences at stake.

Company officials told board members yesterday that they are negotiating a penalty for the errors and are willing to add a penalty clause to future years of the contract. No dollar figures were disclosed.

Of the 120 individual testing materials sent to Hawai'i, only 15 contained potential problems, Tanner said, and DOE officials acknowledged that at least two-thirds of Hawai'i’s schoolchildren took tests that were completely error-free.

The single live-test question problem occurred on the third-grade math test, affecting 12,500 students. Students were asked to fill out a grid that wasn’t on the page. Tanner said it was a production error during the printing process in San Antonio.

Most of the other problems fall into a category of having no effect on the test results, he said, while only a handful of others are worth taking a second look at any possible impact.