The Power of the People

It was strong tonight at Ka'a'awa Elementary School. Wow...a lot of people turned out for such a small school. The people were impassioned too. One guy stood up and made quite the speech. He spoke about the power of the people and how the Hawaiian people living in Kahana Bay saved their land a few weeks ago. He was right. I won't go into all the details of that story, but basically the state tried to quickly force several low-income families out of their homes and after a huge grassroots campaign emerged...they are still there. The DOE was there to answer questions. You would think they could form coherent, grammatically correct sentences...you would be wrong. I thought CRH was going to pass out when the guy used the word "behinder" and then he repeated it like 3 times in a row.

No Child Left Behind results out today...Hawaii is last. Today in the car, Eve tells me all about the sun being a star and how it's hotter and bigger than the Earth and the moon, etc. She goes on forever about it. I didn't learn this stuff in Kindergarten...now in other parts of the country Kindergarten students may be learning Algebra III and Chemistry, but I was pretty impressed.

So, the long and short of it is that a task force must be formed to examine if and when the school will close. This will likely take forever (it is HI time after all). The school is closed tomorrow though (like all the schools across the state). State, County, and City offices are all closed tomorrow because there is a forecast of high winds. Yes, I'm serious. It's like in NC when they close schools because they say it's going to snow and then it dusts the ground. The winds were supposed to start this evening. It's 11:25pm and nothing...later tonight may bring some 40-50mph gusts...who knows?