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By In Social Media

Is There a Way Out of Hawaii’s Housing Crisis?

If you’re thinking about moving to Hawaii, you’re not alone. But transplants shouldn’t necessarily expect a warm welcome. Long simmering tensions about who gets to live on the islands have flared over the past couple of years into a full-blown crisis.

When the pandemic began in 2020, Hawaii’s economy reeled. Tourism crashed, and joblessness skyrocketed. Soon after, remote work combined with the state’s low infection rate beckoned people with means from across the country to move to the islands, while sprawling estates owned by the likes of Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg continued to metastasize. From the end of 2019 to the start of 2022, the median cost of a single-family home on O‘ahu, where most of the population lives, ballooned from $789,000 to $1.15 million. A quarter of all homes sold in 2021 were purchased by out-of-state buyers, who routinely bid well above the listing price, often without seeing the property in person. Homes are on the market for an average of just 10 days.

But the local housing crisis is nothing new; in many ways, the pandemic merely accelerated trends that started when Hawaii became a state in 1959. The cost of real estate has steadily increased since then, fueled by tropical allure and increased accessibility, with only brief and mild downturns. During the Great Recession, Hawaii’s prices dropped less and rebounded faster than those in most of the rest of the country, the whole thing just a hiccup in the state’s ever-hot housing market…

Read more at Dwell

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By In education, Hawaii

Kids And Teachers Love Summer Vacation, But Does It Make Sense?

It’s common in education circles to discuss what school should and could be. A lot of the pieces of today’s education system have remained in place for a century, while American life has changed drastically around it.

One of the largest variables we can tweak is the schedule of the school year. For most schools in Hawaii, that means rethinking the two-month stretch of summer break…

Read more at Civil Beat

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By In Social Media

‘Failing’ Schools Make An Easy Political Target But The Reality Is Far More Complex

Last month, Tulsi Gabbard posted a video on Twitter about Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, commonly referred to as the “don’t say gay” bill. She didn’t just applaud the bill for “prohibiting classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in certain grade levels” – who knows what could happen if kids learned that gay and trans people exist in the world – she accused public schools of “indoctrinating” students with “woke sexual values.”

“The reality we’re facing in this country is our schools are failing,” Gabbard said, claiming one in four high school graduates are “functionally illiterate.”

She continued: “I’m confident that if our schools focused on educating our kids, teaching them the fundamentals … we would see our literacy rates improve … This is what our public schools should focus on.”

The idea that public schools are not focusing on teaching fundamentals came as a surprise to those of us who actually spend time in public schools…

Read more at Civil Beat

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By In Social Media

There Are Many Reasons To Get Involved In Your Kid’s School

Last week began with a row of police cars parked in front of our school. Over the long Easter weekend, a student posted an online threat to shoot up the school, prompting police presence and limited lockdown measures for most of the week.

The threat was posted on a “vent” Instagram page, where anyone can anonymously say whatever they want via a Google Doc, which then gets posted. The page that posted the threat was quickly taken down, which spawned a few new ones where more threats were made.

Admittedly, I didn’t think anyone was really going to come to school with a gun, but that isn’t to say I thought the situation was trivial. The feelings behind a lot of school shootings – isolation, frustration, desperation – are no doubt present across school campuses, and have already manifested horrifically. If anything, what alarmed me most was how kids threatened something like this so casually.

This is America: school shootings happen every year. The most common response from the communities where they happen is “we never thought it could happen here.” So even if I suspected the threat was really a handful of knuckleheads trying to get school to close for a few days, we have to be vigilant…

Read more at Civil Beat

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By In Social Media

Don’t Get Rid Of Your Masks Just Yet

When the mask mandate ended, the change was instantly detectable. It wasn’t just the visual difference of seeing groups of people indoors without masks on. There was a change in the general atmosphere, a vibe shift.

The most vocal and predictable response was that of relief. At the Safeway I frequent, the people who have audibly complained about masks for the last two years were no longer wearing them around their chin; now they strutted freely down the aisles, faces exposed like a dog sticking its head out the car window on a ride to the park. It was celebratory and jubilant…

Read more at Civil Beat

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