At a time when local schools are facing shrinking enrollment and talks of closure, Hawaiian immersion programs are bucking the trend. 

Enrollment in schools that teach primarily in Ê»Ćlelo HawaiÊ»i — collectively known as Kaiapuni schools — has increased by 68% over the past decade, with the number of campuses run by the state education department growing from 14 to 26. But students tend to have fewer immersion options in middle and high school, and the pool of qualified teachers isn’t keeping up with families’ growing demand.

Recruiting qualified teachers is one of the largest barriers to expanding Kaiapuni programs, Office of Hawaiian Education Director Kau‘i Sang said in a recent education board meeting. The Department of Education needs to find a balance between adding more classrooms to meet families’ needs and hiring enough teachers to support existing Kaiapuni schools, she said. 

DOE plans on opening two new Kaiapuni programs at Haleʻiwa Elementary on Oʻahu and Kalanianaʻole Elementary on the Big Island.

“We cannot open classrooms unless we have qualified staff,” Sang said. 

Currently, DOE has three unfilled Kaiapuni teacher positions, Communications Director Nanea Ching said in an emailed statement. The department also employs 25 unlicensed Kaiapuni educators who still need to fulfill their teacher training requirements, she said. 

But the number of additional teachers needed to fully staff Kaiapuni schools could be closer to 100, said Kananinohea MākaÊ»imoku, an associate professor at the University of HawaiÊ»i Hilo’s College of Hawaiian Language. Some Kaiapuni teachers are taking on larger-than-average class sizes because of staffing shortages, she said, meaning the annual vacancy rates underestimate the number of educators schools need. 

DOE will need 165 more Kaiapuni teachers in the next decade to fully staff its classrooms and meet families’ growing demand, according to ʻAha Kauleo, an advisory group of Hawaiian language schools and organizations. The projection doesn’t account for a large group of teachers who are expected to retire in the coming years, Mākaʻimoku said.

Last year, UH Mānoa and Hilo produced a total of 12 licensed Kaiapuni teachers.

It’s difficult to find candidates who are both fluent in Hawaiian and interested in teaching, MākaÊ»imoku said, especially because Hawaiian language speakers are in high demand in many careers. But a lack of teachers doesn’t mean schools should stop expanding Kaiapuni programs, she said, especially when the movement has so much family support and momentum. 

‘No Option But To Leave Their Home District’

The HawaiÊ»i Supreme Court has  that the education department has a constitutional duty to provide families with access to Hawaiian immersion education. Two lawsuits  argued that DOE has fallen short of this responsibility by creating unique barriers for immersion families, such as waitlists for enrollment and limited immersion programs in some school districts.

One of the lawsuits was dropped over the summer, but the second remains active. 

Currently, families are pushing for more immersion options in Pearl City, which has no middle or high school for Kaiapuni students. Children can attend the Kaiapuni program at Waiau Elementary until the sixth grade but then need to transfer to immersion programs in Kapolei or Honolulu for middle school or switch to an English-language program.

 to add Kaiapuni programs at Highlands Intermediate and Pearl City High School received more than 100 signatures over the past three weeks. 

“Our keiki start their educational journey in Hawaiian immersion programs, but upon reaching intermediate and high school levels, they find themselves with no option but to leave their home district,” parent Chloe Puaʻena Vierra-Villanueva said in written testimony to the Board of Education.

The department is planning to add more grade levels to existing Kaiapuni schools next year and provide families with more information on how to enroll in immersion programs, Sang said. Her office also plans on tracking the number of open seats and waitlists across the state to determine which communities have the greatest demand for Kaiapuni classrooms. 

Since 2020, the state has also offered a $8,000 salary bonus to Kaiapuni teachers to attract more people to classroom positions. 

Kahea Faria, an assistant specialist at UH Mānoa’s College of Education and a Kaiapuni parent, said she would like to see more DOE campuses solely dedicated to serving immersion students across all grade levels. Creating environments where Hawaiian is the only spoken language is critical to students’ development, she said, and could possibly encourage more kids to pursue teaching careers in Kaiapuni schools. 

“Right now, with a growing number of students, they have very limited opportunities to grow their language abilities,” Faria said. 

The state also needs to look beyond Kaiapuni graduates to expand the potential pool of immersion teachers, MākaÊ»imoku said. For example, she said, offering more Hawaiian language classes to families and community members could encourage more people to earn their Kaiapuni teaching credentials. 

“That’s definitely a conversation that all communities in HawaiÊ»i should have,” she said. 

This story was originally published on Honolulu Civil Beat.

Teachers say Struggly, available for at-home or classroom use, is a game changer for K-8 students discouraged by math or having a hard time with traditional tasks because of language barriers or learning disabilities. In game-like tasks aligned with common core standards, students manipulate shapes, animals, and algebraic formulas to build foundational understanding. 

The platform’s potential reach is hard to overstate as educators urgently search for ways to address the : On average, only one in four kids are proficient in 8th grade math; the number hovering between 9-14% for Black, Native and Latino children.

In approximately 340 schools across 28 states and 21 countries, Struggly has become the go-to supplemental learning platform for some educators whose students had difficulty socializing or collaborating after missing in-person learning in early childhood during the pandemic. School sites range from gifted programs and large to smaller private schools serving students with special needs and juvenile detention centers. 

, “put the student in the driver’s seat, don’t make them reliant on any sort of literacy, but also don’t make them rely on an adult to tell them what to do,” said Tanya LaMar, CEO and cofounder, adding its unusual design was intended to “allow all students to have access to math regardless of language, socioeconomic status or any kind of diversity markers.” 

Many educators have found the platform via conferences across the U.S. At SXSW EDU, the platform won this year’s Community Choice Award for the , celebrating digital innovations helping to bridge learning gaps. 

Levels designed to become more challenging as students go on can be solved multiple ways, encouraging learners to talk to each other about their strategies and challenge common misconceptions that math is more about memorization than reason or logic. The video game-like design, with no time restrictions, also keeps students calm and engaged longer, teachers say. 

After using Struggly for one month – 20 minutes, three times a week – 63% improved scores on state tests and 68% felt more engaged in their math classes, according to independent research from WestEd. Teachers have also noticed fewer outbursts and negative self talk, more confidence and less .

One district survey revealed students were more likely to agree with statements like, “if I work really hard, I can become very good at math” and to disagree with “people can’t change how good they are at math.”

Struggly was originally imagined by designer Alina Schlaier, whose daughter came home from first grade one day saying, “I hate math.” Schlaier found Stanford math expert Jo Boaler’s resources online, but knowing that it wasn’t sustainable for her to prep each lesson for her daughter, the designer reached out to Boaler with the idea of forming a company that would blend their skills. 

Boaler’s former PhD student Tanya LaMar joined the effort, bringing an educator’s lens to its creation, once a Los Angeles Unified teacher. There, she had faced compounding challenges: teaching math while teaching kids to see math beyond the narrow way they’d been taught it must look – facts, procedures to be memorized.

“Meanwhile, neuroscience research tells us that there’s no such thing as math brain 
 I felt like I was up against a lot trying to convince my students they could be math people, when struggling in math is seen as a sign that something’s wrong,” LaMar said. “So Struggly is about supporting students to embrace struggle as an integral part of the learning process.”

Such a shift has been transformational for educators like Gregg Bonti, a math group teacher at Mary McDowell, a quaker school in Brooklyn serving students with language-based learning disabilities.

Typically, his 4th and 5th graders arrive with some “resistance to learning and school.” At the start of the year, as soon as something felt challenging, many would shut down or push back on tasks, or start to talk to themselves disparagingly. Many also struggle with impulse control, but the games’ design has helped them “slow down” and “strategize.”

“It’s really rare and challenging for us to find websites that meet students where they’re at with their language skills,” Bonti said. Removing language from the tasks and letting them dive in has “neutralized” the playing field for his students, who come to class with a range of reading abilities. 

Since introducing Struggly in December, he’s finding students are more eager to persevere in math tasks and ask each other questions like “what if we tried this?” It’s also helped their teachers distinguish between their conceptual misunderstandings of math versus difficulties with language. 

Across the country in California’s central valley, one rural educator has been finding similar impacts. 

At Semitropic, a small school of predominantly Latino, multilingual students living in poverty, 3rd grade teacher Jennifer Fields was looking for platforms that would encourage and engage – they felt burnt out by Prodigy, but she needed something standards based. 

The first day she introduced it, one student went home and played on their own for three hours. It’s become so desired she can use it as a motivation for them to finish their other in-class work. 

Conceptually, it’s helped them grasp onto geometry concepts like manipulation and transformation easier than in traditional workbooks. They’re learning how to better communicate math concepts verbally, something she worried about seeing the difference in this group of children who had the equivalent of Zoom kindergarten. 

“That in itself has been my biggest success for the year is the fact that now they will work in cooperative groups with each other 
 they’re being more verbal and realizing it’s OK to talk about, ‘oh man, I didn’t get it.’ They go find that person and they immediately go to try to help them out instead of just having them just sit there, freak out, suffer and get mad,” she said.  

And because the platform is so visually and sonically engaging, teachers are finding it’s helping students learn independence and staying on-task. That has enabled Shelly Anderson, a 4th grade teacher in Salt Lake City, to be able to conduct small groups with students who need more specialized support; the others are able to work on Struggly independently, helping each other, as she provides more individualized attention. 

One student, who had a tendency to swear and give up, sometimes leaving the classroom, is now self-regulating his anger and frustration better. He no longer says he “can’t do this” or that “I’m dumb at math,” even during usual instruction.

“It’s just refreshing to have something for the kids to do where they can untether from the teacher more,” Anderson said. “They can start to get some of their own confidence and build their identity as math learners rather than just thinking, ‘well, either I have a math brain or I don’t.’ Everybody has the ability to seek out patterns, look at problems and look at logic.”

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation sponsored SXSW EDU’s Launch Startup competition and provides support to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.