Summer may come late for students

For Hawaii’s 183,000 public school students and 44,500 University of Hawai’i students, school may not be out for summer if the current teacher strike continues for much more than three weeks, officials say.

Department of Education spokesman Greg Knudsen said students would not be held responsible for all days cancelled by the strike, but merely those beyond four regular school weeks.

“It would just be anything exceeding 20 days,” he said.

The University of Hawai’i system, said UH spokesman Jim Manke, doesn’t have a definite schedule for how long a strike would have to progress before students would have to make up their classes.

Before pushing the spring semester into the summer, Manke said officials would likely try to play with the extra time allotted before final exams and between the end of the semester and commencement.

“There’s no hard and fast target date,” he said. “We’ve got some flex time we could end up using.”

Any additions to the public schools’ schedule would have to be approved by the state’s school board, Knudsen said, and accepted as part of the settlement with the Hawai’i State Teachers Association.

“It would likely have to be part of the bargaining package,” he said.

Danielle Lum, spokeswoman for the HSTA, said summertime classes would be an unpopular option among teachers.

“We would much rather settle before we have to deal with that,” she said. “But that’s going to come up in the settlement talks.”

Manke said representatives for the University of Hawai’i Professional Assembly had mentioned being willing to negotiate additions to the university system’s schedule, but that nothing had been decided on.

“The union said they were going to put that on the table,” he said.

But HSTA executive director J.N. Musto said the settlement talks have a long way to go before that subject is brought up.

“We haven’t even gotten close to that conversation,” he said.

Staff writer Matt Smylie can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 226) and mailto:msmylie@pulitzer.net