Two decades ago, a dozen kids sat down in a compound at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority, and began to bat around ideas about the perfect education.
The students were the inaugural class of West Hawaii Explorations Academy, and they were helping the charter school’s founder Bill Woerner decide what type of campus to build.
“We said, we want no classrooms, we want to be outside, let’s have it on the beach, let’s have a shark tank. Woerner just sort of rolled his eyes,” said Chama Cascade, one of those first kids — now a grown man.
“But for better or worse, it all came true,” Cascade said on Saturday.
WHEA has since moved on from the days of tents and improvised classrooms, and shipping containers used as buildings. When a new and expanded campus was completed last July a couple of miles mauka and south of the old shoreline school site, the school tried to carry with it the key legacies and memories of those founding days.
They moved the shark tank, the aquaponic projects, even the rock walls. But they left behind the lava field, the tsunami zone and the ear-splitting thunder of airplanes taking off overhead. And some of the sense of impermanence.
Sitting in the midst of a community fair showcasing the new campus, WHEA co-director Curtis Muraoka reflected on the years of history.
“Those kids developed the campus over 20 years,” Muraoka said. “The campus and the ideas the kids had for it grew organically.”
The original vision of a school where classes take place outdoors persists at the grades 6-12 school, despite everyone’s appreciation for the two air-conditioned computer labs, wet laboratories and workshop space. In all, the $3.7 million project created 10,400 square feet of classrooms, labs, multipurpose rooms and administrative space — plus a 20,000-gallon shark and reef tank — on 4.7 acres near the NELHA Gateway Visitors Center.
In those buildings on Saturday, students were demonstrating to parents, their peers and others how they have used a 3-D printer to create real prosthetic limbs. One of the fully jointed and mobile plastic hands is being used by a 3-year-old girl on Oahu who was born with no fingers. A prosthetic forearm and hand will benefit another 5-year-old in Montana, said the school’s robotics teacher Liana White.
Students also led tours of the campus and showed how a project to create aluminum wheels was benefiting the NASA Mars Exploration Rover Mission.
The school — which specializes in science focused, self-directed learning — was able to add 25 students last year for an enrollment of 257.
“We have a lot more elbow room,” Muraoka said. “We plan to increase enrollment over the next few years. We’re still trying to feel what the ideal enrollment is.”
Senior Damien Rideout said he’s glad that students and teachers no longer have to fall silent in the middle of class and wait for the roar of planes to die away. Only a few helicopters and small aircraft fly over the campus now, he said.
“This feels more like a school, more structure,” Rideout said. “But I feel it’s the same school on the inside.”
When WHEA was smaller, every adult knew every child, Muaoka said. While that’s not the case anymore, it’s still true that most adults know most of the children, he said. The school is seeking just over $1 million in funding from the Legislature this session for a building that would double as a cafeteria and classroom, and allow still greater student capacity.
To dedicate an entire building just to a dining facility that would be empty much of the time didn’t seem like a good use of space, Muraoka said.
The expansion would allow the school to serve meals and use federal funding to get free and reduce lunches to students. The facility would complete the school’s first phase, but initial money for the project fell short, Muraoka said.
“We’ve been brown-bagging for 20 years,” he said.
Although many of the state’s charter schools have managed to grow and create long wait lists, they also have had a hardscrabble legacy of surviving in tents and scrapping with a centralized education system for funding. The schools have variously fought to offer Native Hawaiian-based curriculum, project-driven education and agricultural learning as a state-funded alternative to conventional Department of Education schools.
At WHEA, the battle appears to be paying off.
“There’s a lot more diversity in projects now,” Cascade said. “A lot more community involvement. It’s benefited a lot of kids over 20 years.”