14 October 2023, 9:28 PM
Quincy, the third-grade puppy from Sacred Hearts School, a service dog from Hawaii Service Dogs, at Sacred Hearts Mission Church on Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2023, in Lahaina, Hawaii. The 3 public ones that survived the fatal fire in August are expected to reopen this week. (AP Photo/Mengshin Lin) Credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS
(AP Photo/Mengshin Lin)
BY ASSOCIATED PRESS
LAHAINA, Hawaii (AP) — Children sit at folding tables in the courtyard of a church miles from where their school burned. The plastic containers contain new textbooks temporarily sent by a publisher. Recreation takes place on the resort’s golf course across the street. .
The wind-driven wildfire that ravaged the historic Maui town of Lahaina this summer has driven many students not only from their homes, but also from their schools, leaving their families and school officials scrambling to find other tactics to teach them.
Now, more than two months after the Aug. 8 wildfire that killed at least 98 people, the three surviving public schools will reopen this week, posing an emotional crossroads for traumatized youth and their families as they decide whether or not to return home. the schools. campuses or continue to the other schools that have hosted them.
Some parents said they wouldn’t send their children home because they feared the fireplace would leave toxins, despite assurances from school officials that the campuses are safe.
“I’m positive and grateful that we can come back,” said Cailee Cuaresma, a 10th-grader at Lahainaluna High School. “I’m thankful that our country is still standing. “
For the past month, Lent has been attending classes on the makeshift campus of Sacred Hearts School, a Catholic school founded in 1862. Most of the school burned down, however, its leaders temporarily set up classes at Sacred Hearts Mission Church, 16 km (16 km) away.
Sacred Hearts and other private schools in the state have taken in displaced students from public schools, such as Lent, while offering them a year of free tuition. Other students took the bus for more than forty-five minutes to get to public schools on the other side of Maui. or opted for distance learning.
On a recent school day at the Sacred Hearts transition site, teachers moved students between bags of shade to protect them from Lahaina’s relentless sun. Principal Tonata Lolesio told students gathered on padded benches in a chapel that it could be two years before they can leave. Return to a rebuilt school.
“Pray that it can be sooner,” he said.
At the same time, the lack of space forces students to attend catepassries on staggered days. Workers have prepared an adjacent lawn to set up tents, which will allow at least the little ones to go to school on a daily basis.
Lent sitting with an organization of young scholars petting a golden retriever brought in through Assistance Dogs of Hawaii. His space survived the fire, however, his father recently returned to his job at a hotel. Being at Sacred Hearts is a smart opportunity because it’s a challenging task, he said.
A public school in Lahaina, King Kamehameha III Primary School, was destroyed. Students there will share the area with Princess Nāhiʻenaʻena Elementary School, which closed for chimney cleaning along with Lahainaluna High and Lahaina Intermediate.
Schools are within a few blocks of potentially harmful ash piles, which worries parents, but school officials said air quality tests show reopening is safe.
“He’s going to back off a foot there,” said Tiffany Teruya, mother of an eighth-grader at Lahaina Intermediate.
She and her son, Pu’uwai Naho’oikaika, have been staying in a hotel since their apartment building caught fire. He participated in a Hawaiian immersion program connected with Lahaina Intermediate.
After the school closed, the program held outdoor categories, away from the burned area, and focused on cultural activities such as making bamboo trumpets and running in taro plots.
Teruya doesn’t know where she’ll send her son once school reopens and the immersion program returns to campus, she said.
Debbie Tau’s two children will be returning to their schools in Lahaina and she is also concerned that the air is safe. They live in a community in Lahaina, north of the burned area. She plans to drive them after fall break, when the school district stops offering buses to Kihei’s other schools, which are about forty-five minutes away.
“Asbestos is anything that scares me because it’s carcinogenic. And 10, 20, 30 years from now, our children could have cancer,” he said. “I feel like it’s like going back to COVID, where every single resolution what you do is wrong and you’re putting your children’s lives at risk. “
Some public school academics who have personally joined plan to stay. Patrick Williams said the first time he saw his son Kupa’a praying at the Sacred Hearts reminded him of his own formative years in Mississippi.
“I thought, ‘Oh, this is where he’s been all along,'” Williams said.
The family, whose home was not affected by the fire, will make sacrifices to pay school fees, especially since Williams lost most of its water supply roads from Lahaina to the fire.
The complicated cases have led teachers to try other tactics to communicate with displaced students.
At Maui Preparatory Academy, which at one point hosted 150 public school students, Gabby Suzik, a science and math teacher, said she communicates with her best students at Lahainaluna School who lost their homes. Suzik lost the space she and her husband had bought last year on Front Street in Lahaina.
When some students showed up at Maui Prep without shoes, backpacks or pencils, she told them not to worry and pointed out that she was wearing borrowed clothes.
“I just like to be fair to them and say, ‘Hey, you know, I understand what’s going on and you can let me know anytime,'” Suzik said.
During a Hawaiian culture party at Sacred Hearts, teacher Charlene Ako tried to connect with third-graders at Princess Nāhiʻenaʻena Elementary School by showing them a photo of the princess with a bird feather necklace around her head, a symbol of the monarchy she once ruled. The Hawaiian Kingdom.
Ako asked students to draw photographs of local Hawaiian birds. Maile Asunción, 9, drew a red iiwi, also known as a scarlet vine.
Until she was 7 years old, she and her circle of relatives lived in a cabin in her grandfather’s house, near the historic Waiola Church, which burned down and where the princess is buried. The cabin burned down, as did his grandfather’s house, forcing him to move to Kihei.
Maile and her circle of relatives were unable to return to their new home in a condominium, which survived but is located in the burned area. They now live in the hotel where their father works.
Many of Maile’s friends have dropped out of school, and her most productive friend, whom she desperately needs to see again: “She’s still in Maui, but I don’t know where she is now. “