Eia Tita, Kou Kalipa: Waialeale Sarsona at TEDxManoa
when my four-year-old was enrolled at pun okako I was picking her up from school one day and as a career Mom I'm rushing off to the next meeting and I was walking and I was holding her hand and we were walking up a paved pathway and I was looking at her saying a Viv baby we got to go and she started pulling back at my arm so I turned around I looked at her and she had lost her khalipa about 4T away at that moment a teenage girl in a blue uniform and a bag and her books walked up grabbed her khalipa walked over walked over to to her and said atita kipa smiled at her and walked away that moment sealed my commitment and my fate to H focused education because for me as a makua there was no other place that I could get and experience the kind of care and Aloha that I did at that very moment she didn't know who we were I never met this teenager I later found out she was she graduated from kako that year in the months to come I had enrolled why Al Ali at kako and spent the next 5 years as the school's director today I am privileged to be the director of hakik at the Kamala schools that supports over 17 of these Hawaiian Focus schools these schools are thriving we've seen an increase uh quadrupled in in enrollment in the past 10 years we've seen more and more community members striving to open their own schools in their own communities and part of my role is helping our native H communities open more of these schools and to help the ones that are open to become stronger and better better to serve more Hawaiians so what does that mean well I can tell you that there are many researchers out there that we all know and love that can give you all the research that you want to hear but this is not what I'm going to do to for you today a few years into my time at kamoko I was asked to be on a panel and it was to discuss what you would call success for a native Hawaiian child in a Hawaiian school and the purpose was to share this with faculty and staff of a school that was considering becoming a Hawaiian school what I got for that presentation was uh plant and it was a PO Hina so I took that home in a beautiful vase and my then six-year-old daughter says to me mama what do you use it for what is its value and I said to her well isn't it beautiful with it silver leaves and purple flowers we're going to plant it in our yard with the rest of our plants and she says for what what am I supposed to do with this plant what is it good for from that three-minute conversation with my daughter what I realized was she she had a connection to our AA to her people and to her surroundings more than I could imagine in just two years that she had been at kako but more importantly what she just did was demonstrate Hawaiian education she took what she had learned in school and she applied it in her everyday life today we call that trans transformational that's amazing that education does that right our kapuna have been doing it all these years that's the way we've learned that's the way we live and yet this is the way that our nation is saying we're moving in terms of Education that common core standards are are the are the thing that's going to help us become who we already are so when I look at these Hawaiian Focus schools I see what we already know and I see what we already live and what our kpuna have already been living and now we've all all of a sudden become uh our way of education has become Innovative and that the rest of the nation is moving towards that and to me I say it's about time because we already were doing what our Cuna taught us to do I want to share with you this last story and it's not my own but it's an important Story one of my colleagues shared this with me and on a Hawaiian focused charter school it is very very rare to have a fight very rare because schools are so close because they are students and families are treated like Ohana there's very little uh discipline that happens and that's wonderful but I'm not saying it doesn't happen it happens so one day these two boys uh during recess during VAP Pani started arguing and that eventually led to a physical fight as you can imagine to the surprise of the kumu and the surprise of the students these boys were actually fighting so students started running towards the fight kumu started running towards the fight and one student a female walked right up to the fight looked at them and said the fight ended immediately by the her action and her words the fight ended immediately so I ask you on what campus in our Public Schools would you ever see that kind of understanding and care that these students shared I tell this story because it is what when you hear this story you understand you understand exactly what Hawaiian Focus Education is and you understand exactly what it means these two boys understood that their actions and behaviors that they just did was inappropriate and was wrong and they took it upon themselves to self-correct they took it upon themselves to apologize to those babies for their actions by simply the courage of one girl walking up to that flight and saying the babies are are watching now I know many of you want data you want statistics you want to compare group right that's what we all supposed to do in order to say it works or it doesn't so as one of my roles at Kamehameha schools of course we do all of those things so I can tell you now that we've been tracking many of these students for the past five or plus years we still have a long way to go but I can tell you what the data says students attending these schools have a very high attendance rate higher than our Public School System they love being at these schools they love seeing and being a part of what they get every day in these schools parents are very satisfied more satisfied than our Public School Systems they and if you are a kapuni Ohana as I am you know how much time and effort we put into parent participation and that is higher than average and of course we see academic gains for our students we see growth over time I'm not telling you that our schools are perfect but I am telling you what they've accomplished in the past 10 years with our students that our public school system has not been able to accomplish in the past 100 years with our students and so what I tell you today is that we have a long way to go that yes we're not perfect but we can see promise in all of our schools and we can see hope in the things that they are doing and I can only expect them to grow so I leave you with this haaha khalipa so what is that moment in your life what is that thing that really gave you without a doubt your deep understanding of what is right about Hawaiian education and I ask you to think about sharing that khalipa that moolo with others so that as we move forward in our journey to self-determination the more and more people we will have to join our path for for he are