Jack Wong is the CEO of Kamehameha Schools. Jack joined Kamehameha Schools in 1997, first serving as senior counsel from 1997-2000, then as director of the Endowment Legal Division from 2000-2013. Drawing from his unique journey from the legal realm to the helm of one of Hawaii's most influential educational institutions, Jack imparts wisdom on cultivating a shared vision while managing a diverse workforce. His insights offer a roadmap to any leader striving to navigate the complexities of steering a multifaceted organization without losing sight of its core values and mission.
Learn more about Jack Wong.
Visit the Kamehameha Schools website.
Watch a video about the legacy of Kamehameha Schools.
Jack Wong is the CEO of Kamehameha Schools. Jack joined Kamehameha Schools in 1997, first serving as senior counsel from 1997-2000, then as director of the Endowment Legal Division from 2000-2013. Drawing from his unique journey from the legal realm to the helm of one of Hawaii's most influential educational institutions, Jack imparts wisdom on cultivating a shared vision while managing a diverse workforce. His insights offer a roadmap to any leader striving to navigate the complexities of steering a multifaceted organization without losing sight of its core values and mission.
Learn more about Jack Wong.
Visit the Kamehameha Schools website.
Watch a video about the legacy of Kamehameha Schools.
My goal, as always, you know, we have to be at the top of our game. In every industry we are in against our peers. So you know, we got to be a great school but we also have to be a great real estate company. And those are two different cultures. Right, the cultures different, the measurements are different. You know, what I've learned over time is it's really hard to organize all the activity. Somebody people are doing so many different things, but you can organize around how we think and how we approach it.
Speaker 2:In this episode I was privileged to sit down virtually across the Pacific Ocean with Jack Wong. Jack is Chief Executive Officer of the Kamehameha Schools in Hawaii and has been with the organization since 1997 in a range of roles, culminating in the CEO position. Jack is a graduate both undergrad as well as from the law school of UCLA and, prior to joining Kamehameha Schools, was involved in corporate law and finance. Jack and I touch on a wide range of topics, from his origin story to the fascinating origin story of the Kamehameha Schools, to his philosophy and approach to leading a diverse organization with 3,000 employees, thousands of students, multiple campuses, business interests in Hawaii as well as globally, and really, his emphasis on cultivating a unified mindset that's in keeping with the mission and vision of the Kamehameha Schools, rather than trying to micromanage what happens on multiple campuses and within the multiple business interests that are part of the organization.
Speaker 2:I highly recommend this episode. It was a pleasure and an honor learning from Jack and I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I did participating in the conversation. Welcome to the Superintendent's Hangout, where we discuss topics in education, charter schools, life in general and not necessarily in that order. I'm your host, dr Sharedda. Come on in and hang out. Welcome, jack. Thank you so much for coming on this afternoon and hanging out with us for a little bit.
Speaker 1:It's really my pleasure to be here. David, happy to be here.
Speaker 2:As you join us from beautiful Hawaii. I was wondering if you could start us off with a bit about your own personal origin story, where you come from, what your journey has been like up to the present moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'd love to be able to share that my story. It's funny because when you talk about origin story you're talking about superheroes, but it's not a superhero story. I grew up in Hawaii. I spent all of my childhood here. I attended UCLA, so I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles. I went to UCLA undergraduate and law school. I graduated as a lawyer and really started practicing as a corporate finance lawyer and was practicing in Southern California for a number of years.
Speaker 1:I moved back to Hawaii and continued to practice here, was doing a lot of litigation, doing a lot of corporate finance and real estate. I started working here at community schools as a staff lawyer and I've been here for a long time. Somewhere along the way in the last nine years or 10 years, I was elevated to be our CEO. My journey from there includes raising a family, as we had that journey of our job. I do have three kids Sort of an empty nester now, so there's a lot of free time that I seem to have. I bought back a lot of my free time. That's me. I spent a lot of time trying to be a good CEO for our organization.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm also an empty nester so I know the feeling. My daughter's somewhere in Europe right now. That's about as specific as I could be. So that's a big change really in orientation from the corporate world to Command and man. Even though, as we'll talk about in a little bit, your organization is large and complex and multifaceted. It's not limited to school but assuming that the school is kind of the center, the schools are the center of the whole organization. Can you talk about how that transition was for you and what led you into really the educational realm?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know it's a really complex organization, a lot of moving pieces, but at our core really are our campuses and our preschools, and part of my journey is really learning how to be and you probably know this because you have had a lot of discussions about superintendents but we're trying to learn how to be good at being a school leader in the right level and understanding a system of schools without interfering too low at what they're doing. But I'm always a learner, so I'm learning so much about education and about how schools work, how administrations work, and so it has been a journey for me to understand and really start to articulate what our system is and is it.
Speaker 2:Could you tell our listeners kind of give our listeners an overview of the founding of Command and man schools? They have incredibly rich history and really important one.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you a little bit about what we do today and then I'll tell you about how the origins are. So ask us what we do. At our core, we have 3K through 12 campuses One on Oahu, one on Maui, one on Hawaii Island. We operate 30 preschools across our state. We also have community education programs. We have extension programs. We have grants and supports that we do for a lot of native Hawaiian organizations. We are also the largest private landowner here, so we have about 10% of the lands in Hawaii. We have about $4.5 billion of commercial real estate. We have about $15 billion in total assets that we manage. That is a global portfolio of all kinds of different assets. We also manage 20% of our watersheds. We have agricultural lands, we have endangered species, we have forests, we have watersheds, we have streams. So we have quite a complex land operation as well as a financial operation and then managing our schools and our community spend overall.
Speaker 1:So about a $15 billion endowment that this school operates. The origin story is really. That is sort of what we do. Who we are is really about our origin story. So if you go back to, I think the Hawaiian history would be there. So if you go back to when Captain Cook first landed in our islands, this was 1778. So this was a time when native Hawaiians had been here for generations and generations. Some estimate as many as a million native Hawaiians living here on our islands and King Kamehameha was our leader. He had united all the islands.
Speaker 1:53 years later, our founder was born. Her name is Princess Pohi and she is the last linear descendant of the Kamehameha line of leaders in Aaliyi, what we call them here. And in those 53 years the population had dropped from about a million or 800,000 down to about 150,000 of native Hawaiians. So the loss of life, mostly through disease, but also through colonial influences, loss of land, loss of power, loss of life, loss of sovereignty. And the 53 years of her life the population went from 150,000 to 40,000. So in the span of her great grandfather and her life, really almost a 20 to 1 loss of life for native Hawaiians. And this was when our school was founded as a school to help her people restore themselves and their kingdom through education.
Speaker 1:So our purpose is not just about running a school but is also restoring people, restoring sovereignty and the things that kind of go with it.
Speaker 1:Over the 120 years of our existence so 130 years of our existence we have seen the population grow, which is a good thing, through intermarriage and through the changing of community and we are seeing a slow but really strong regaining of our culture, of our identity and our people.
Speaker 1:But yet we're still at the bottom of many indicators prison rates, health rates, educational outcomes and so our challenge is really really big. It's a challenge of poverty, it's a challenge of culture, it's a challenge of identity. So our origin story really is tied to our commitment to the Hawai'i people, the restoring of our Hawai'i people in their own homeland, and with that comes the lands that we're really responsible for as really being an elite trust or a trust from one of our royal line, just kind of managing that over time has got a certain kind of responsibility that goes with it. So our campuses and the purposes of our schools are really built around Native Hawaiian identity, understanding how our kids and we have a preference for Native Hawai'is, how their journey as learners is tied to the future of the Hawaiian people. Sorry, there's a lot the story is a lot.
Speaker 2:It's inspiring and I tried to capture some of it in my research and on YouTube and you catch snippets, but it's great to hear that encapsulated that way. Your schools have an enrollment preference for native Hawaiian students. How does that process work in a practical sense and have you faced challenges and struggles with maintaining that over the last 150 years or so?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think our preference for native Hawaiians is really based upon from our foundation. It really comes from our well and comes from our foundation, so it's been part of who we are for a long, long time. We have had challenges in the past about our preference for native Hawaiians but really the preservation of that preference is also about not just about the preference for native Hawaiians, but it's the purpose of our schools. The purpose of our schools is really to restore people, to restore the identity of the people. So it's really tied really really closely to our purpose of our schools. To me, the preference policy is connected to the purpose of our schools and the purpose that our students have and I think that's sort of what locks it and connects it for all of us a lot better to understand how that process works. And we do have a high demand for our school. I think at our kindergarten level it's probably 10 to 15 to one, based upon the number of applicants we have.
Speaker 2:So we have a high application pool to choose from, and I noted on your website that in the application process it talks about applying for financial aid and then it encourages anyone and everyone who meets the criteria to then apply for financial aid. So, taking into consideration what you mentioned about poverty indices and prison population, all the socioeconomic pieces, I'm assuming that your schools give out a substantial amount of aid. Can you talk kind of a bit?
Speaker 1:So generally I think about, depending on the campus and the preschool, somewhere between 70% to 80% of our students are on financial aid. Our tuition right now is about $6,000 a year, so that's tuition itself is already subsidized plus the financial aid that comes on top of that. So really 75, 70, 80% of our population is still on financial aid and so the vast majority of our families in need. I think what we try hard to do is to make sure that our campuses really connect and relate to kind of our population as a whole. So we try to do geographic representation of where people are across the islands. We have a 25%. Orphan and indigent is our first category of entry, so orphans and indigents have the highest preference to come in first.
Speaker 1:And then it is a competitive testing process too, so we both have competitive testing as well as focus on those in need, as well as a representation across state, because we do have native wines on all of our islands and we don't have campuses on all of our islands, so we also have another 350 or so borders in a boarding program that we have that come from islands and communities where we don't have a campus.
Speaker 2:I think I saw it. I may be misquoting the number, but I think I saw that the organization employs somewhere around 3,000 individuals. Is that accurate?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we have about a little over 3,000 full-time staff here. We have lots of you know from a school. We have lots of coaches and others that kind of run around the campus to add on top of that. But yeah, we do have about 3,000 on our campuses, preschools programs, as well as all of our land and land stewardship activities.
Speaker 2:So how does an organization I'm just always fascinated by the maintenance of, or the quality assurance piece right the adherence to a mission and vision? You're broad as an organization, you're multi-island as an organization. How do you as CEO, and your team obviously, work to promote and nurture and ensure that that original vision of the princess and that real prescient view that she had? I understand she didn't have children of her own and this was really her gift to the islands, right? And so how do you ensure that from your position.
Speaker 1:So you know, it's sort of interesting, sort of and this is a journey that I've learned too, because you're probably like me like you see operations, and there's lots of operations in an organization like ours, and so you know, I tend to think of it like lines of business. We have certain lines of business that are connected. So we have schools, we have preschools, we have basically something like a community foundation, we have a real estate business, we have a kind of agricultural conservation business and we also have a financial business. So my goal, as always, you know, we have to be at the top of our game and every industry we are in against our peers.
Speaker 1:So you know, we got to be a great school but we also have to be a great real estate company. And those are two different cultures, right, Just the cultures different. The measurements are different. You know, what I've learned over time is it's really hard to organize all the activities. Somebody's been doing so many different things. But you can organize around how we think and how we approach it. And the same thing with our campuses and our schools. You know there's a quite a bit of empowerment that we try to do campus by campus, as we were in schools. But I have, you know, a set of things that we really call that are closely held. These things we all got to do.
Speaker 1:And to me, you know, it really starts with and I've been a little deeper so you can pull me back on if I go too deep it really starts with mindsets, and to have a native Hawaiian point of view is really, really important, and the mindsets really start with how we view certain fundamental things. So, like, one thing we think about a lot is the choice between culture and academic success in a school, like you know, like if you're spending time on Hawaiian culture and you're learning about all the different things that happen in our culture. Does that compete against academics in your brain? Do you think in your mindset or like is it either or like too much culture? We have discussions on that right. Like too much culture, not enough time for geometry, too much culture, not enough time for English literature? We have to understand our mindset needs to be that our kids can do both. We have our culture and you can have academic success. But, more important, we have to believe that through our culture will come academic success. The more you learn about your culture, the more you practice your culture, you'll understand your identity of who you are. As a native Hawaiian, you will be more successful because you understand your why, you understand your people, you understand where you come from. So driving academic success through your cultural identity is an important mindset to understand and not have to compete against each other.
Speaker 1:The second mindset we'll get three. So the second mindset is really about community and individual success and in a lot of schools, a lot of places like your, individual success is what your goal. You wanna be the best version of yourself. You wanna be really successful In our Hawaiian community. In our world view, it's not community success or individual success. You don't choose your success over your community. It really is one. You can have both. But, more importantly, it's the same thing for us. You cannot be successful if your community is struggling. You cannot be successful if the things around you, your family, is not. You're not uplifting them as part of what you do. So part of your identity is a collectivist view, which is, the success of our community is just as important as your individual success. That's why we train our kids to be what we call OVB leaders and leading their community. So that's the second color mindset.
Speaker 1:And the last one is just local or global, and that's a Hawaii maybe. It's a Hawaii thing a little bit where sometimes we don't feel like we're good enough here in Hawaii, where we can't compete globally. We gotta bring an outside help to make us feel better. We gotta go outside to get better. But a lot of times when we realize when we're the best version of ourselves, we can leave globally and our kids need to believe that it'll have to change who they are in order to be global leaders. It's sort of those mindsets that drive our academic, but it also drives our organization. So if you're not thinking like this and you're worried about your individual success or you're not understanding the cultural framework that we build, then you're gonna struggle in the organization, right. But so building that framework is really, really important, I think, as we kind of say, like what are we all gonna do the same?
Speaker 1:And from those mindsets we develop and you know this from schools we develop a set of student-learner outcomes that's universal across all of our campuses and we call it Eola, and Eola is in Hawaii. It's to live on or to live. It's how we live, and part of the concept is we wanna learn how we live. We wanna live how we learn, and it's important that you don't come to school and try to be somebody different than you are at home, right, and that we teach you in the context of your people. And so I know it's a little more complicated, but the framework of the student-learner outcomes is if you're a tree and also our kids are trees, but if our kid was a tree, you would have roots and in your roots would be your culture. That's where you have to understand, and we have a set of outcomes that understand your genealogy.
Speaker 1:Where did you come from? Well, it's about your EK component, the knowledge of your ancestors. The second part is about your relationship with the land and your people, the Allah Ainu. And then the last piece is about your values. The trunk of the tree would be your connection to your community, what we call kulea, the obligations you have to serve your community. That's sort of who you are and why you exist. And then the leaves of the tree in turn. The student-learner outcomes are all the academic things and all the different things that you do, from collaborations too, and for us, as we think about things, it's sort of like we're always grounded into who we are serving our community. And then all the leaves that pop up and all the amazing things. You do have a sense of grounding and purpose. This framework that we develop is not just for our campuses and our preschools, but also how we approach managing our land, managing our finances, and it's sort of the one thing I hold tight with everybody. Sorry, I don't need the long explanation. Everybody can be asking questions.
Speaker 2:No, it's fascinating and it strikes me as really refreshing at the idea of being the best or being an elite at something that doesn't have to be at the expense of someone else. Right, that it's almost. I'll be the best version of myself. These are elite programs, but they're elite together, rather than the cutthroat kind of a feeling of you know, you go to school and you hear these horror stories of really competitive environments where people are hiding other people's textbooks so they don't do well on the test or those kind of things. Yeah, it's an interesting reflection. I appreciate that, because that was one of the things that, as I researched your organization, I thought how do you keep on top of this thing? Right, it's so diverse programmatically. I mean, I think I saw one of your campuses was 600 acres and I'm thinking we, our middle school and high school together, we're on four acres together in downtown San Diego. I'm thinking 600, all what I could do is 600. But that's also the gift of land, right, again, the princess could see in the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I think. Yeah, there's an upside and a downside to a big campus, as you know. It's good because you got a lot of room, but it's also, you know, struggle because you got a lot of room. And I think, the good thing about our campuses. We do try hard to make sure that the land that we have isn't just buildings but it really is reflective of the place. So, to the extent that we can, we'd be really clear to have forests and streams as part of the learning. We spend a lot of time on the iron or on the land. As part of how our kids connect to their culture is through the land. So it's important that our campuses have that connection to land, whether it's, you know, right on campus or off campus. But it is sort of important how we help our students really connect right in the right way.
Speaker 2:Have you run into challenges with, you know, the inevitable education authorities that govern schools? I realize you're private, but sometimes bureaucracies don't understand that statement that you made that the academic rigor comes through culture. I'm just thinking in my context and of course we're public, publicly funded. I'm thinking we would definitely face at a certain point that push back either from a board or state agency saying, hey, here are these test scores. If they're not high enough, then maybe you need to sing and create art a little bit less and focus more on what tests have you faced it?
Speaker 1:I think that's a really good I mean, that's a good observation. I think all schools face this a little, as you try to challenge how you approach. So we have something here that we call Hawaii culture-based education. This is how we educate our kids, so we have a set of student-learn outcomes.
Speaker 1:But Hawaii culture-based education is really leaning on a native Hawaiian-based way of educating it and it's interesting because it's sort of content, like what you learn, but it's also context, like how one learns right, and it's contextual and it's probably not different than other places where you wanna be contextual to your kid's culture and where they come from, to connect, be able to connect to them.
Speaker 1:I think that's just good teaching practice, right To understand. But I think that there's always this tension about whether that approach is rigorous enough, where you're gonna get the results you need on the test score, whether you're gonna get the outcomes that are measured in a different way. And so you're right. I mean, I think the struggle always is having to prove that the approach we're taking has effectiveness, and sometimes that effectiveness is gonna be measured in things like test scores, and you gotta know that's just part of our world too. So you gotta have both. You can't say I don't wanna do test scores. You gotta know that that's part of the journey. But you're right, there's a lot of uncertainty. We actually have a research arm here that we actually spend time researching our practices so that we can really go deeper and to understand, like data-wise, like what's working and what's not.
Speaker 2:How did your schools fare during COVID? My first visit to Wahoo was halfway through COVID and for very understandable reasons, hawaii was about the strictest place probably in the United States. California was strict but nothing compared to Hawaii around COVID and access and that sort of thing. How did your students do and your staff?
Speaker 1:You know, I think it's we have the rear view mirror, I think a little bit to be able to look into it, and I do think there's.
Speaker 1:I think it was hard.
Speaker 1:I mean I don't think it was hard on our kids, on our families, on our teachers, and everybody had to adapt really quickly, whether you were doing remote learning or hybrid learning, and I have to give a lot of credit to all of our educators and our teachers because people adapted really, really quickly.
Speaker 1:And even in that process and I think our kids did as well as you could do in that period, I just I still feel like things were lost. We might never know what that loss is until a generation goes through, because just time I know my own son was in high school and was graduating right in that period and it didn't seem like at the time there was like loss because they didn't mind staying home and taking class in bed. But you could tell there's something lost socially, there's something just developmentally, but it's hard to put your finger on it. But I do feel like we're still watching and tracking and doing our best. I mean, the nice thing is I think our families are pretty resilient so they can push their way through it. But I do worry, probably like yourself, that there's something was lost in that process.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was thinking also of the, as you described, 800,000 population, going down to 100 and then 40,000, obviously the Hawaiian islands have a traumatic history with pandemics. I mean there's no other way to put it. You've actually mentioned that when I was in Hawaii and we heard that, we saw this amazing presentation at a dinner where your students presented, danced and sang and recited poetry and it hadn't even occurred to me that because I had my California mindset and you said, actually the pandemic piece is traumatic part of the island's history.
Speaker 1:So that's a really good observation and I do think it's funny because when we were talking back then there was a very much I had a different graph at some point about that showed the decline of the population tied to different, basically different types of pandemics over time and how each one impacted the population. And if you sort of looked at COVID you could just feel sort of that continued trauma from those times to just be able to think about like, is this what we're going through again? And I do think that part was probably and it's really up to everyone in your part. That's probably the part that's not spoken about as much and people talk about a lot of the external things, but just the psychological feeling of helplessness. Right, you go through these things and, like you said, we've lived through this on our history. It's a little bit here we go again.
Speaker 2:Thankfully didn't get to that level, but it's, we know, all over the world and socioeconomically it was pretty unequal, right In terms of the impact. So I know if you're dealing with low income families, I'm sure they had its disproportionate impact, right, right, I wanted to shift a little bit and ask you about initiatives or philosophies such as DEI and critical race theory and all the wonderful cultural war flashpoints that we're seeing in various places in the United States. How do you and your team look at and think about and work through and teach concepts like diversity, equity, inclusion, critical race theory or something related to that, in the context of working primarily with Native Hawaiian students?
Speaker 1:I think it's interesting. I think, if you think about our history, our culture and, hopefully, our approach to how we connect to our past, to how we connect to concepts like equity and diversity and inclusion within our own homeland, that these things are because you don't really want to think quite about those words here, because they have such a different context in where we are. But I think the principles are the same in large part, which is how are you looking at issues of historic trauma? How are you looking at issues of historic inequities? I consider the foundation of our school to be really to be about equity, to be able to not just socioeconomic equity but political equity and racial equity and things that go with what it is to be a Native Hawaiian.
Speaker 1:I feel like it's so foundational to our school that it's a very natural discussion, but it's also not a distinct discussion. It's a discussion because this is our purpose of our schools in so many ways. I think if we integrate it correctly and we talk about our purpose, the concepts will flow from that. It's a little bit like when we think about concepts of sustainability and ESGs, because those are also, as we think about how we manage our land, what I always think, if we manage our lands in a cultural way that is very regenerative in its nature, that you'll accomplish things like managing watersheds, managing species, managing water and our resources in a way that's both cultural but very naturally sustainable. We can almost talk about it in the context of what we do and not have to talk about it in a different context that we borrow from something else.
Speaker 2:Or the majority. I'm assuming the majority of your teachers and staff are Native Hawaiian. I think so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was just I think if we do our work correctly, whether you're Native Hawaiian or not Native Hawaiian, the purpose of what we do and how we approach our work and how you teach should make us feel like we're Native Hawaiian school and we're part of something that's contextual, whether or not you're Native Hawaiian. I think that's the amazing thing is that I think when you're of this place, you can connect to its culture and its people in a way that can really help out what we do.
Speaker 2:I guess it sounds like it's evident that you're doing such a fantastic job with the mindsets. A mindset is independent of ethnic or racial background. Really Exactly, yeah, but mindsets are hard too.
Speaker 1:You probably do this in your schools too. You could talk about mindsets, but I find in leadership somebody told me one time the hardest thing about leadership was the boredom. I'm like bored, but you tell the same story over and over, and I used to tell the story a little different because I was bored and I just entertained myself by telling it a little different. And then people hear different things as you go around talking, everybody's like you said it different every single time. So I've learned to try to be a little bit more. I say it the same way. You think about the mindsets and you got to reinforce it, and as a leader you can't just do it to entertain yourself.
Speaker 1:You have to make sure you stay consistent.
Speaker 2:And as leaders we don't repeat it frequently enough. Other people will take it and they'll repeat it and the game of telephone ensues. And so sometimes the game of telephone goes in the right direction and sometimes it doesn't. That's always something.
Speaker 1:I'm interested in in schools because I always feel like whether it's in a classroom or it's an administration, as you work. People want the ability to create. People also feel better when they can create something and execute it and they want to put their creativity to it. So, making enough room so that people can create, because if you create everything for them and just tell them to execute, it's really not the same Right. How do you make enough room for creation within a certain boundary that feels enough creativity, but still within a framework that makes sense?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think in some ways it's harkens to the US Constitution in a way. Those are the guiding, the document and then, of course, being amended over centuries but guides things. But clearly we create and we make laws and we do away with them and we shift and to try to stay within that and it's a delicate dance, I think.
Speaker 1:Well, it's interesting because every organization has like founding documents. So we have a will and kind of, like you said, like the Constitution. There's sort of I guess you could be a strict constructionist and say I'm going to take everything literally, or you can be, you know, you can have a little bit more interpretive look of the framers and say I'm going to interpret it in modern context. So there's a lot of that going on, I think, just generally when you have founding documents.
Speaker 2:I was wondering if you could talk about the greatest success that you have seen in your time, and it's been. I think you started in 1997. I think, if I have my dates right. So you're coming up on an important anniversary for yourself and your involvement. Greatest success that you've seen, and then the greatest challenge that your organization has faced.
Speaker 1:So I think I think, from you know it's hard to say success because there's so many things that you know our people are doing I always think that you know our greatest success, you know, has to be our students, right that you know how they graduate our schools, how they come out of our preschools, how they come out of our programs. You know, I think every class that we have, every group that we have, you know always represents, you know, in that year, the best success we have, because that really, you know, they represent the product of all of our thinking, all of our work, all the things that we do, and if we're successful, you'll see it in them. So I do think you know our greatest success has to be, you know, in our kids and the things that really come out of our students and the product that we do. You know, I think, from a challenge standpoint and I'm going to maybe go deeper in the challenge, probably not just the school challenge, but it's probably a challenge for our entire state is that we do have a long-term issue in our state about people leaving and Native Hawaiians leaving. We have in the census this year, 2020 census the data comes out a little bit slowly, but it was really the first time you had more Native Hawaiians living outside of Hawaii than in Hawaii. And that's shocking to us because even just 10 years ago, in the last 10 years, we probably lost almost nine or 10% of the population native foreign population and a lot of it is tied to jobs.
Speaker 1:It's tied to cost of housing, cost of living, cost of everything. And the future we worry about is we can have amazing I know our lands here, we can have our schools, but will our people still be here? And what does it take for our people to be able to live here and thrive here and feel like this is a place that can continue to call home generation after generation, and the fear is, as people leave, it's really hard to see how this place continues to be the same. So I think one of the challenges we have as an organization because we do have land and we can create jobs and we can create housing and we also can educate our kids Are we educating our kids into a place that they can continue to live. So housing is a huge issue. We spent a lot of time thinking about that. Jobs is a big issue and just the cost of everything, the cost of living.
Speaker 2:Cost of living everywhere and then, of course, on islands, it's even more right. I'm assuming well, actually I did look at this you're impressed with where you graduate school to college. They're going to college all over the United States and not just in Hawaii. Is that a challenge? So you're an example of someone who went to UCLA and then you were turned, but I'm assuming that a lot of folks, whatever you go to NYU and then you go to law school and then you get a job in New York City and before you know it, you're 50 years old and maybe you aren't thinking about going back to Hawaii.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think what's hard is every situation is different, right, I mean, every child has a different, every family has a different set of desires. I think our hope is, but our learner outcomes is absolutely we want our kids to be academically prepared, socially prepared, financially prepared, succeed wherever they are. But hopefully the roots in the trunk, their connection to their lands, their connection to their people and their family and their commitment to their community will draw them back. And it might not be right away, it might not be 10 years, but to contribute to this community and not live here is still possible. Right, there's other ways to contribute to the community and then eventually to know that you can come back.
Speaker 1:Right, it's hard when you know, when you think you cannot come back because you can't afford to come back. So I think part of the two things that I was thinking about is like are we creating a place where people can come back? But, more importantly, are we creating young leaders who are going to solve the issues and create a community where their peers can come back, where their kids can come back? Because I do think in education, like, our job is in large part a two generations of change which we want to raise kids who are going to create the change for their kids, and that's both the pressure as well as the opportunity our kids have to say like this is the community as it is and this is what we're training you to be and to do, and to what challenges you have to overcome. So I know that a lot of times when we think about things that we're learning in school, it's not just theoretical. These are real problems that our kids should be solving.
Speaker 2:Are there downsides to having such a large endowment as an organization? I mean, I think there's not an educator out there who wouldn't say, wow, I would love to be able to even subsidize in a private sector, for example, subsidize tuition. $6,000 in the modern context for private schools is almost nothing for tuition, right. But there must be some challenges that come along with having such a big endowment. Whether there's a public perception piece, whether it means that people think tuition should be zero, whether it means that staff think that every teacher should make a million dollars a year. I don't know what the challenges are, but could you talk?
Speaker 1:a little bit about that. I think that's a great observation, because one would never say that having the resources is a bad thing.
Speaker 1:But I think I start with the premise that the purpose of our schools a lot of schools might think like once I have a letter kid into our school and I have the walls, then my job is to educate the kids within the walls of the school. I do really believe you know our challenge as an organization is to make sure we have good native wine education for all of our native wine families. And so if you just have numbers like we probably have about 7,000 students in our campuses and preschools. In the age group that is like from zero to 25, there's probably 150,000 native wine kids. So we serve a small fraction of them. So I would never say we have enough resources because there's so many kids.
Speaker 1:We cannot reach right Either through our campuses or through all the community programs that we support and including a number of charter schools, including a number of native wine focused schools, and I think it's really you know the frustration I think we have is we actually all believe you know we need more resources because we have such a big task in front of us, but absolutely for our campuses.
Speaker 1:When we do have kids on those campuses, you know, I do think you know our job really is to make sure they have all the resources they need, and our teachers need to succeed. But there's always gonna be the tension between how much are you spending on the kids on your campus and how much are you spending the kids that don't get it, and how much are you making sure that you have for their future generations so you don't spend that all today, right? So you know, part of our motto is about intergenerational equity to make sure that we have we leave successes with as much resources as we have today. So you can just can't just spend it all. Right, you really will have to have a sustainable motto year over year, and I think we add all that up. That doesn't ever feel like this excess. It's always felt like so much more we could be doing.
Speaker 2:What is your engagement with the charter sector? Charter school sector. Look like I know that's an interesting concept for me. Do you help fund charters? Do you run them? How does that look Well?
Speaker 1:I think you know we don't help run them but we do have, you know, a number of important touch points. One is we do have part of our organization which is a community education which really supports whether it's charter schools or immersion schools or it's other native Hawaiian schools. You know we do try to provide financial support when we can. We also try to. We do a lot on teacher education. We do a lot. We have a group that we work with called Kanai O'Kana, which is a network of native Hawaiian schools and a lot of the sharing that goes on there is about sharing curriculum, sharing, teacher trading, having commonality of kind of the same things we've been talking about terms of cultural foundations and access to INA and things like that. So a lot of work with our charter schools. I know, you know we always could be doing more, but I know our state, including the public schools, you know, are challenged to make sure they can hit all our schools.
Speaker 2:You've been very generously with your time and I want to really honor that and very appreciative. I have one last question for you, but before we get there, is there anything that we haven't covered today that you would like the listeners to know, about your schools, about your organization, the work you do?
Speaker 1:No, no, first, I appreciate the opportunity. You know, david, it's always so. It was good fun to just kind of hang out and the chance to share about what we do. No, I think we've had a really good opportunity to share. I think you know the passion we have for you know our mission and serving our people is so strong that you know we could talk. I could talk about this for hours because I really, really think it's important. I always, you know, one of the things I do appreciate is you know that we need to continuously learn from so many different organizations. You know, like your organization, when we do stuff in Gwask, just our ability to learn and get better is such an important part of what we do. So I just appreciate the opportunity, you know, to continue to connect and learn from all the people all around us and that's really really important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wanted to just let the listeners know. Really, the genesis for this conversation was a presentation you made at a most recent Gwask Commission meeting when you spoke kind of more in depth about your organization. And I sat there and I said I've been going to Gwask Commission meetings with this guy for a few years and it hit me, I said I got to talk, I'm going to bring him on the podcast if he'll come. So and it's really in the process of researching your schools and your organization.
Speaker 2:It's kind of, as a someone from California and originally from New York, we have all these caricatures in our minds about Hawaii, right, the typical beach paradise kind of thing. And then when you start to sit and listen and hear stories like yours and hear stories like the founding of your organization, it's humbling and powerful, and so I just really appreciate the work you do for all of your students and for all native Hawaiians, and so that's really special that I got this chance to talk to you today. My last question is a hypothetical. You have a chance to create a billboard for the side of a freeway? People are driving by it pretty fast and so they don't have much time to stop and see a ponder, but it's got to be something catchy. What does your billboard say to the world about your work, about your belief system, about what you value and what you think is important?
Speaker 1:I think you know like so much, this is such a good question and I gotta say I've never had that question, so I probably should think about it more before I answer. But I'm gonna give you what comes off the top of my and then you know, I do think that I mentioned like so foundational to us is this concept of AOLA. It's because it's not just a set of student learning outcomes If you could just put it on a billboard it's about how we live, because it's about living on it. It's about not just what our students are going to become, but the foundation of who they are, so that when they solve those problems, all the problems we got, whether it's housing, whether it's how our people live, whether it's the perpetuation of our land and our culture, it's done with that foundation.
Speaker 1:And that foundation is, to me, is such a critical part of this organization because I think really our contribution is to understand that cultural identity of our people. And to me that's the key to good education, when you have your why and you understand who you are and you're proud of who you are. But it's also, I think it's our way out, it's like our way forward as a community. And so what I do when I'm the broken record we're talking about and I keep saying the same thing over and over. But this is really what I talk about because it gives us an identity and pride in who we are, and that's such an important concept, I think, to really maintain hope for the future. But I would hope we put it on a billboard and people would see it and understand that that's the essence of who we are.
Speaker 2:Thank you, jack. It's been a real pleasure and I think that's an appropriate place to finish Aola on the billboard. I love it. As we wrap up this conversation and hopefully at a future date we'll get a chance to do this again, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:I hope the next time I see you because hopefully you have a chance to come visit us here I'd love to. I would love to flip the tables and have our headmasters and our educators really get a chance to meet you and see what you do in your system. I've been reading about you, doing my research too, and I love what you're doing and I would love the opportunity for our educators to get the benefit of your knowledge. So I don't have a podcast and give you an idea, but I would love if you could talk to our leaders and just give some inspiration to us.
Speaker 2:I would love to come and open at any time. I'd love to come and learn and share. So thank you, thank you for your time and be well, and I'll be seeing you at the upcoming WASC Commission meeting.
Speaker 1:Thank you, I appreciate it. I really said I'm gonna be here and really, really appreciate the opportunity and I will talk to you all soon. Thank you, allah Hafiz.
Speaker 2:The Superintendents Hangout. Thank you for listening to the Superintendents Hangout. You can follow me on Twitter at DVS1970. Please be sure to share this show with friends and family on social media and in the real world. Thank you to Brad Bacchial for editing and production assistance and to Tina Royster for scheduling and logistics. Thanks for hanging out and have a great day.