by Diana West at Diana West
Above is a snap of Keith T. Hayashi, Superintendent of the Hawaii Department of Education, presenting a report on “Maui Wildfire Impacts” on August 24. The “impacts,” of course, have been ghastly — surreal . For starters, none of Lahaina’s four public schools in West Maui are operational since the fires of August 8. However, it is in this same DOE report that we can see, in the dispassionate navy blue and white of a simple graphic (below), that over two thousand — 2,025 — previously enrolled Lahaina schoolchildren are missing from the public school system. That’s a little over two-thirds of the 3,001 children heretofore served by Lahaina schools who “have not re-enrolled in another public school or opted for distance learning.”
As if to soothe spiking palpitations of panic, the slide also notes that these two-thousand-plus kids may well “have moved out of state” or “enrolled in private schools.” Yes, yes, they may well have done exactly that. Further, some or even many of these children and their families could be so overwhelmed by the ordeal they are suffering through that school is the last thing on any of their minds. But it is also possible, as noted by the Hawaii Star Advertiser, that some of these children “may have died in the fire.”
Certainly, then, establishing the safety and location of these thousands of young children should be a priority for all concerned — especially given that the government’s messaging for the past couple of weeks seemed designed to gird the public for some appalling number of dead children to be tallied among the fatalities. Of course, that was then.
What would you say if I told you the subject did not even come up in Governor Josh Green’s Day 20 “press” conference yesterday (August 28)? Green didn’t raise the matter. Instead, he both reaffirmed the death count, unchanged, at “about 115,” and drastically lowered the official missing count to 388, only to immediately shave off another 100, leaving the “unaccounted for,” by my count, at a new low of 288 people.
What about an update on the whereabouts of 2,025 schoolchildren reported…
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