Hawaii Community College and University of Hawaii Center at West Hawaii officials welcomed their new director Friday with drums, chants, mele and hula, during a traditional kipaepae ceremony at the Kealakekua campus.
A kipaepae “invites the spirit into the community,” Hawaii Community College Professor Taupouri Tangaro said, as he began the ceremony. “The kipaepae gives us an opportunity to step into this need of ours, to connect with others.”
The University of Hawaii Board of Regents last month hired Dr. Kenneth “Marty” Fletcher to fill the executive director vacancy in West Hawaii. Fletcher will be the first director when the college moves to its new Palamanui campus in the next few years.
“He has a big job ahead of him,” Hawaii Community College Chancellor Noreen Yamane said. “In a short while, we’ll be able to move into our new facilities.”
Fletcher said he was ready to take on those challenges.
“The most important thing will be for people to understand what’s available here,” he said after the ceremony. “Until Palamanui came across the horizon, we didn’t have a catalyst to consolidate that message.”
The UH system is flexible, he said, and offers students ways to continue their course of study without necessarily leaving Kona.
“Higher education is changing,” Fletcher said, referring to distance and online learning programs. Much of what is offered at UH’s flagship Manoa campus and other locations is available, in some form, through the community college program, he added. People are blending higher education into their lives, he said.
Fletcher has family roots on Oahu, and had visited the state regularly over the years. He was the senior lecturer (online education) and program director for Open Universities Australia at Griffith Business School, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia.
He said Hawaii Island’s beauty, the people and “the fact that I think I can contribute, to help higher education cater with the trajectory of growth in West Hawaii.”
Fletcher received his doctorate in education, specializing in learning management and educational technology from Walden University, Minneapolis and his master’s in international management from Northern Territory University (now Charles Darwin University), Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, from which he also acquired a credential in adult/vocational education.