High school students and teachers from around the Big Island will gather at Hawai'i Preparatory Academy in Waimea this weekend for the first annual Student Congress on Sustainability.

About 80 students and teachers are expected to participate in the free event sponsored by HPA from Sunday through June 11.

The Congress will feature workshops highlighting a wide range of sustainable and environmental issues, including global warming, energy conservation, wind and solar renewable energy sources, converting diesel cars to run on cooking oil, sustainable lifestyle options, recycling, and composting and organic farming.

For more information, contact Karen Yamasato, assistant chair of the HPA Go Green Committee and one of the original organizers of the Congress, at 808-881-4013, or by e-mail at kyamasato@hpa.edu.

CHAMINADE PROF AN AWARD FINALIST

A Chaminade University of Honolulu professor has been named as one of eight finalists for the 2008 Thomas Ehrlich Faculty Award for Service Learning.

Wayne Tanna, whose accounting students have helped hundreds of low-income residents file tax returns, was the only professor selected as a finalist in the Islands. Tanna said this past tax season alone, his students helped 123 individuals and families get back more than $175,000 in refunds and credits.

The Ehrlich Faculty Award honors one faculty member annually for outstanding contributions to the community. Last year, the award went to Richard Pan, of the University of California-Davis. The award is given by Campus Compact, a nonprofit coalition of more than 1,110 college and university presidents committed to building more civic engagement.

Chaminade University President Sue Wesselkamper, in a news release, commended Tanna and his students. "He has been instrumental in our service-learning program, especially through his innovative tax clinics," she said.

GRAD STUDENTS WIN SCHOLARSHIPS

James Jack and Pamela Runestad have been named this year's recipients of the Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship Foundation scholarships. They were honored May 27 at the Japanese Consulate in Honolulu.

Jack will attend the Inter-University Center in Yokohama during his first year for advanced Japanese language training. During his second year, he will work with galleries, museums and artists in Tokyo to reconstruct a narrative of Mono-ha (Object School) artists. He is working on his master's degree in Japanese art history at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.

Runestad is investigating treatment selection of HIV patients in Japan. She will complete her second master's degree in medical anthropology from UH-Manoa this summer and will continue on to the doctoral program in the same department this fall. Runestad will study at Shinshu University in Nagano.

The purpose of the scholarship is to promote better understanding between the peoples of Japan and the United States by offering scholarships for study in Japan and in Hawai'i. Each year two graduate students are sent from Hawai'i to Japan and two from Japan to the University of Hawai'i. A total of 129 scholarships have been awarded since 1973.