A Hilo-based Hawaiian immersion public charter school received a $1 million federal improvement grant, which will go toward further development of its in-house tests and hopefully boost overall student performance.
Ka ‘Umeke Ka‘eo was the only Hawaii school to receive the School Improvement Grant this year, a federal grant designed to support Title 1 schools that “demonstrate the greatest need for the funds and the strongest commitment to use them to substantially raise the achievement of students,” according to a state Department of Education news release.
The grant will remain in effect through the 2018-19 school year.
Ka ‘Umeke plans to use the money to extend the school day an extra 25 minutes on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday starting in January and an additional 2.15 hours on Wednesdays, which currently are earlier release. Money also will be used to hire more staff to allow regular teachers to spend six additional hours each week for planning and training.
In addition, money will be used to continue developing “home-grown” assessments and the charter school’s data warehouse which tracks student progress, Principal Olani Lilly said.
Ka ‘Umeke was deemed a candidate for the School Improvement Grant based on its Strive HI classification two years ago as a priority school, Lilly said, a designation for low-performing schools.
However, some Hawaiian immersion schools say state assessments aren’t a good measure of their students’ success because they’re administered in a language different from that which their students are instructed.
Lilly said Ka ‘Umeke already had begun to make changes and the grant “accelerates that work going forward.”
“That’s what really made us an easy fit for this grant,” she said. “We had everything lined up. We were well-positioned for it. We had this plan already worked out and this is just helping us accelerate that plan further. Something that might have taken three to five years now we might be able to do in two or three.”
“The grant uses Strive HI measures — based on state assessments — as a measure of success,” she added. “We don’t really utilize that because we don’t think that measures what we value as far as our education. So we want to make some real gains based on our own performance measures and assessments and not whether we do well on Strive HI.”
Schools nationwide have received more than $7 billion since the School Improvement Grant program began. The DOE said in the news release the grant has been credited with a decline in dropout rates and an increase in graduation rates.
Some results are mixed. The Ka ‘Umeke grant initially was to be awarded to Kekaha Elementary School on Kauai.
Kekaha reportedly turned it down because it thought results
from previous grant recipients were discouraging, according to a March letter from the Kauai Complex Area superintendent posted with the DOE news release.
Additional information can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/SIGgrant
http://tinyurl.com/SIGgrant
Email Kirsten Johnson at kjohnson@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
