Monday message 06.05.2023

Aloha mai kakou to the good people in the Alaka’i O Kaua’i Charter School learning community, and we hope this message finds the summer break for our learners off to a splendid start.

Mahalo nui for your support during the extremely successful 2022-2023 school year as verified by the recent outstanding success that learners had in the state of Hawai’i standardized writing assessments. Next week we will outline the specifics of the SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium) results with you in the Monday Message but we can openly share that our school performed over double digits ABOVE the state and complex area results in 14 out of 18 categories. That is correct and not a misprint-DOUBLE digits above, but we still have much work ahead in the theme of continuous improvement.

Speaking of continuous improvement, it may be summer break but it never slows down here on campus. Summer break is a busy time as the twelve-month employees work through June and July to ensure that our campus is ready for everyone to return in August.

Two cornerstones of school improvement are Mr. Jon and Mr. Adam. They take on projects to improve our school while everyone is away. This summer they have an extensive list of over 20 projects that they will work on to help make our unique school even better for our learners. Mr. Jon has been the key figure in transitioning the school from surviving to thriving as he alone came to campus five short years ago and reclaimed the vacant school back from the jungle. We wish to share our appreciation for their work and hope you all understand that we could not be where we are today without their efforts.

We have included the 2023-2024 school year calendar below for your planning purposes. We are excited to add a School Nurse on site next year who can help monitor student health and track student attendance for us.

Lastly, we fully respect that “life happens” but humbly request that you please book major trips away from school during the natural breaks of the school year. One area that our school needs to improve in is the state of Hawai’i tracking of chronic attendance issues which starts at 15 absences or more as we are currently above the state average in this metric.

Best wishes to you all for a wonderful weekend ahead. Malama pono.

DJ Adams – Po’o Kumu (Director), Alaka’i O Kaua’i Charter School, Koloa, Hawai’i

“Ua ola no i ka pane a ke aloha.” There is life in a kindly reply.