Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 16, Number 9, 1 September 1999 — Busing [ARTICLE]

Busing

Ka Lāhui Hawai'i stands united with students, parents, faculty, staff and administrators of Ānuenue School and other community supporters in calling upon the Department of Education to provide busing for Anuenue School. Like English, Hawaiian is an official language of the State of Hawai'i and the DOE has a responsibility to provide instruction in Hawaiian to every child who desires it. Since the DOE ean only provide Hawaiian immersion for K - 12 at Anuenue, children are forced to attend that school from great distances. Therefore the DOE should pay for their transport just as it does for all school children in the state who must ride a bus to obtain a basic education. The DOE controls many thousands of acres of Hawaiian trust lands for whieh Hawaiians receive no compensation. When the DOE retums control over these trust lands to Hawaiians, we will no longer require busing funds, as we will have our own revenues. It was the DOE who beat our parents and grand-parents for speaking Hawaiian, almost driving our ancestral language into extinction. It is only just that the DOE endeavor to repair that terrible wrong by paying for busing. Keali'i Gora Honolulu