In early September, Lisa McDonald — the embattled principal of Hanalei School — was reassigned, culminating a year-long controversy in predictable fashion from a large out-of-touch bureaucracy. The familiar script-like sequence went this way: McDonald was assigned last year, succeeding
In early September, Lisa McDonald — the embattled principal of Hanalei School — was reassigned, culminating a year-long controversy in predictable fashion from a large out-of-touch bureaucracy.
The familiar script-like sequence went this way:
McDonald was assigned last year, succeeding a beloved former principal. Early on, McDonald incurred the enmity of parents and teachers because she seemed unengaged and to make arbitrary and wrong decisions.
Parents wrote angry letters to Bill Arakaki, the state Department of Education’s superintendent for Kauai. But Arakaki ignored them. Although he visited the school a few times and heard out complaints from teachers, he did nothing and failed to respond or even acknowledge the parents’ complaints.
Because McDonald was caring for an ill parent, she was briefly replaced by Todd Harrison, a former high school vice principal. Harrison swiftly won over the Hanalei community, which still recalls his tenure favorably. However, Harrison was not offered the permanent principalship at Hanalei — and was once again passed over as he had been after briefly serving as acting principal at Kilauea School, where he also won high marks from the community and faculty. Fed up, he quit DOE and moved to California to head a charter school.
The current school year started in August, only to find McDonald forcing her decision to combine kindergarten and first-grade students in one classroom against the protests of families and teachers. It was the last straw in a festering dispute.
Weeks later, two of the parents appeared on a talk show on KKCR radio, to which Arakaki called in and bumbled his way through an interview in which he refused to answer questions other than to say he was “investigating” the situation. He also refused to explain why he hadn’t even acknowledged dozens of community complaint letters.
Two days later, this newspaper covered a very public picket in front of the school by nearly 70 parents and children. Arakaki arrived during the protest, but did not engage with the parents, choosing instead to stand nearby with McDonald to observe. Then television coverage joined the fray.
Predictably, since this was all effectively foreordained, the combined radio, television and newspaper attention did the trick. On Sept. 13, Arakaki announced that McDonald would be temporarily reassigned to the district office in Lihue and that a temporary principal would be sent to Hanalei.
If this scenario sounds familiar, it is.
In May, parents at Honokaa High School on Hawaii island followed the script subsequently acted out in Hanalei. Protests against a controversial principal went unheeded until the families forced the DOE’s hand by conducting a picket line protest similar to the subsequent action in Hanalei. In both cases, teachers had filed multiple grievances through their union. In Honokaa, DOE did what it did in Hanalei, finally bowing to pressure and media coverage and reassigning the offending administrator, Marcella McClelland.
To know Hanalei is to realize that it is a tight-knit, highly vocal community that responds like a mother animal seeing its young endangered anytime it perceives its school threatened. In the process, the fight against McDonald probably strayed too far into the realm of personal attack — a fact that many parents recognized and spoke against at one of two community meetings called to address the crisis just before McDonald was reassigned.
It also raised the question of whether an education department is obliged to do whatever a parent group demands. The answer to that is, without question, no. DOE is supposed to exercise creative and informed leadership, selecting talented people to run and teach in schools.
But that is exactly the problem, and why the Hanalei dustup is really only a symptom of a much larger problem for Hawaii’s schools statewide. DOE is a ponderous bureaucracy, infamous for its vision-less failure to act on community concerns.
DOE has a larger problem, however. It is laughably short of depth from the bench in terms of fielding a pool of capable and experienced administrators available for assignment as principals and vice principals. This is a statewide problem, not just on Kauai.
Teachers complain that principals arrive so cowed by DOE rules and regulations that they tend to stick to the book unwaveringly, with utter inflexibility, in situations where a talented administrator would find creative ways to deal with burdensome regulations. An effective principal understands that his or her job is to have the backs of the faculty and the community and to form an effective insulating barrier between arbitrary state requirements and the actual job of teaching kids, which those requirements often complicate or make nearly impossible.
There is no doubt that Lisa McDonald arrived at Hanalei School hoping and intending to do a good job. It was her first principal assignment. Quickly, however, it became clear she was in over her head and, instead of getting supportive assistance from DOE, was left to make a series of bad decisions that alienated families and led about half of the teachers to depart. That, alone, should have been seen as an indication of an emergency situation by district administrators.
Hanelei School was not done in by a bad principal. It was done a huge disservice — like many Hawaii schools — by an education department that bumbles rather than leads.
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Allan Parachini writes a monthly column for The Garden Island. He is a former journalist and PR executive who lives and makes furniture in Kilauea.
