Senate Standing Committee on Education

Good afternoon, everyone. Calling to order the Committee on education. Today's Friday, January 23rd. It is 1:03pm Conference room 2 to 9. And today I would like to also bring. This is our very first meeting of the year of the Committee by itself. Introduce my Members.

To my left is Vice Chair Senator Kidani, and to her left is Senator Fukunaga. To my right is Senator Hashimoto and Senator DeCorte. So we're all here, all five Members of the Committee.

So today's informational briefing is about accountability at the Hawaii Department of Education in light of two recent state auditor reports, one on classroom heat abatement and the other on driver's education program on heat abatement. The Legislature approved 100 million to cool 1,000 public classrooms in 2016.

These investments were made because excessive heat directly affects student health, learning and teacher retention. The auditor's report raises serious concerns about planning, execution and whether those funds are translating into timely relief for students and educators. The driver's education audit similarly identifies gaps in access, oversight and program delivery.

Despite continued legislative funding for many students, especially in rural and underserved areas, driver education is essential and not optional. When programs fall short, students lose opportunities and public dollars are not used as intended. In both cases, the Legislature did its part. We provided the funding.

The audits call into question whether Department has the management systems and accountability measures in place to deliver results consistent with the legislative intent. So this briefing is not just about reviewing the audits. We expect clear answers on how much funding has been spent, what outcomes have been achieved, where delays occurred, and what corrective actions are underway.

So going forward, we expect a written corrective action plan, clear timelines, measurable benchmarks, and regular reporting to the Legislature when public funds are appropriated, especially at this scale, we do expect transparency, accountability and results. And more importantly, we expect our students to benefit from this.

And so for our first audit, we will be taking up Audit 2506 Department of Education and Department of Transportation, administrative Administration of driver education programs and calling on the auditor's office to give us an overview of the audits. And then we will have responders from the appropriate departments come up. Ok, Les.

Good afternoon. Thank you for hosting this briefing. We like these briefings about our reports. My name is Les Kondo. I'm the state auditor. We issued this report about driver education in April of last year, 2025.

We started this audit because of Concurrent Resolution that that requested us to audit both the Department of Education and the Department of Transportation's driver education program. Specifically, it asked us to look at whether the Department of Transportation was Department of Education was providing driver education in its public schools. What they were doing to address the backlog.

It also asks us to look more broadly at both programs, their procedures, their policies. I think maybe Senator Hashimoto was one of the introducers of this resolution. So we appreciate the ask, really enjoy doing this report. Driver education in Department of Education and Department of Transportation. Those programs, they are separate distinct programs. They are not one program.

They each have their own separate distinct program. And because of that. Sorry, because of that, it's really two separate audits.

So I'm going to talk first about Department of Education's driver education program and perhaps maybe we'll take a second or two and talk to the Department of Education and I can come back and talk about the Department of Transportation's program that relates to driver education. So first about the Department of Education.

Little background about DOE and their and their Department their driver education program. Driver education in Department of Education schools It was created by the Legislature in 196660 years ago. And this is the language from the Department of. From that Act Act 42 in 1966. And it identified the Legislature at that time.

It identified this problem that these motor vehicle accidents were causing deaths and. And injuries and and just kind of a side note for Director Sniffin.

According to the act that year there were a Hundred and in 1965, the year before the act, 105 people died on our roads and 8,300 people were injured in motor vehicle accidents in 1965.

Of course not.

See wasn't even for so Senator, you are not one of the people driving on the roads in those days. Some of us may have been. No, not really. Anyway. Sorry, but the I was dead.

Thank God.

The Legislature directed the Department to create a driver education and training program in its public high schools after hours on Saturdays and during summer recess. And then explain the purpose of the program. The Legislature did cite the grave problems created by high motor vehicle accident and death and death rates.

And it deemed this program to be a matter of urgency that the Department provide this instruction to minors as a solution to protect and preserve health, safety and welfare of the public. In 1999, the Legislature made completion of formal driver education program mandatory to get a driver's license for drivers under the age of 18.

So this will age some of us because some of us may be in one never took formal driver education class. 1999 that's when it was became a requirement that started Bill passed in 1999 effective in 2001 in 20202005 sorry, the Legislature passed another law that required graduated driver licensing requirements.

In other words, there were three steps to becoming a licensed driver in the state of Hawaii starting in 2005. But the law today, it still in essence, mirrors the law that was enacted by the Legislature in 1966.

It's been now codified or re codified as Section 302A413, which is on the screen right here, and it directs the Department, or actually, I take that back, it says the Department may authorize or establish a driver education program. It also says that the Department, for purposes of this section, shall do certain things.

Those things being that they must set priorities and prerequisites. They must establish and employ the necessary requirements for and employ the necessary instructors, and they are going to issue or required to issue a certificate of completion of the course upon successful completion by the students. I got to note that this statute, this is the only statute.

I take it back. There's another statute I'm going to show you in a second. But this is the only statute, really, that defines this program, that sets up the structure of this program. There's no other more detailed provisions in the law about how the Department of Education is supposed to deliver driver education.

The Department also may implement or adopt administrative rules, specifically in 302A413. And it's a really important provision. I'm going to come back and talk about administrative rules in a little bit. The other provision in the statute, the only other provision that relates to driver education in the Department of Education schools is this provision.

And this provision says that the Department of Education will hold classes, will certify their own instructors. They'll have courses to certify their own instructors. This is an important provision. I'm going to come back and talk about it later on when we talk about the Department of Transportation's Administration of their program.

But this is something that is important for the Department of Education and something that the Department of Education was not able to do when the Department of Transportation had taken over or when they were administering their program. So I'll talk about this in a second. So what did we find?

We basically found in a nutshell that the Department of Education did not complete the program structure for driver education in its schools. The Legislature created some broad General framework, and it directed the Department of Education to complete that framework, the structure of the program through administrative rules, and the Department did not.

What we found instead is the Department had offered driver education in 35 of its 68 high schools. The 68 high schools includes 21 public charter schools. And of the 35 schools where driver education was offered, three of them were in public charter schools.

So in total, 35 out of 68 public high school offered driver education when we performed this audit. And that would have probably been around the timeframe being late 2024, early 2025.

So what we also found is, we found the Department had not promulgated rules, as they were required by law to do those necessary details to complete the program. That's what's missing from this program. It had not established the prerequisites and priorities that the law directed them to do. It had not.

It had stopped providing training for its own instructors. And like I said earlier, that's at the direction, I think, of the Department of Transportation. We'll talk about that in a second. The Department also didn't have any policies and procedures to guide how driver education was going to be administered in its schools.

Instead of a program, it was treated just like any other after school extracurricular activity. But the Legislature determined that it was the state policy that driver education was going to be a Department program. There's a very big difference between that policy directive and just any other extracurricular activity after school, like robotics or debate.

So as a result, what we found is, we found that there was no uniform manner in which driver education was offered at Department of Education High Schools. 35 schools offered instruction, in essence, the way that they want to do, 35 different ways.

School principals, the school's driver education coordinators, they really had control over whether the school was going to offer driver education and then how they were going to offer it. And I mean, by how that means how they were going to, in essence, advertise so that students or people who were under the age of 19 could apply.

And I forgot something.

The law requires driver education to be available to students, sorry, residents of the state of Hawaii, who, who are age 15 and under the age of 19, regardless of whether they attend that particular high school, whether they attend private school, whether they've graduated already, or whether they've just dropped out from school or maybe they're homeschooled.

But the law requires driver education to be available equally to students or residents who are 15 and under 19 between that age period.

So what we found is the schools, the principals, the coordinators, they were deciding how they were going to advertise, my word, advertise that people could apply for driver education, how that application process worked, who got into the courses, how wait lists, if waitlists were maintained at all what the purpose was and how those were administered.

All of that was decided by the schools and the principal, the school principals and the driver education coordinators at the school. It was not a centralized, uniform, consistent process, as you'd expect with a program that the Department of education was supposed to create. It's that lack of structure.

It really created an opportunity which we'll talk about where it was every man for themselves, kind of the wild wild West. And we see examples where there was favoritism, where there was unfair treatment for people, students, residents, kids, teenagers who wanted to take driver education.

That opportunity was not available to them because of this lack of structure, lack of policy, lack of what we would call controls, where management could ensure that the program was operating the way that they intended and have some supervisory oversight to make sure that it was being off grid the way that they intended.

What we did see, so what we did is it was very difficult for us to locate driver education information on the school websites. How are is a student or resident supposed to understand what opportunities are available for them? So we looked at many school websites and we found that there were different approaches to advertising driver education.

Some didn't have any information about driver education. We did find a number of schools were using Google forms for the application. Handful of them, not all of them, but the forms were different. Some of them required certain information, others required other information. One form required students to provide their, their permit number.

They some one school required them to indicate where they went to school. And it only listed a handful of schools. The schools within that or near that district. Other schools required other information on their Google form document. Their application, it was different. It wasn't standardized. It wasn't one size or one way. It was done differently.

But we also found that some schools like Waipahu is an example. Many schools, they didn't use an electronic online system. They required paper forms. Here's an example, and it's from the Waipahu newsletter. You'd have to find the newsletter to be able to find this information.

I'm not sure how widely disseminated that newsletter is, but it says that you need to pick up the packet in this room. Stop by P36 to pick up an application. Here's another example. Roosevelt High School students must turn in a hard copy of their application. Another example from Kalani.

Here's the hard copy application that needs to be filled out and turned in. This is a good example too. This is Kylie High School online form. Not online form, paper form that we could access through their website.

The Problem is when we looked at this and we found this in late 2024, Kaiser High School, sorry, Kailua High School had stopped offering driver education in 2022. They had the application still up, no information about the fact that driver education was no longer offered at the school.

It was something that a student might to access, fill out and then turn in. But they're not offering driver education at that school. We did see some schools. Sorry. So what we did find because of this lack of structure is often how you get in is who you know.

And we have a little text box here which is this slide. We little. We did a little text box about a situation at Radford High School where some Punahou students were allowed to take driver education during the school day. So that's a four credit course.

A little different than the extracurricular after school courses that we primarily, primarily looked at here. We looked at this one and we highlight this one. Just because by DOE rule, only students registered at the school are supposed to be allowed to take four credit courses during the school day at the school.

These students, initially the allegation was 10. We ended up finding that there were. Well, we ended up talking about the Department of Education's investigation or Department of Transportation's investigation. They only identified two students. The students were Puno students and there was some relationship to faculty at the school.

The students had a relationship with faculty at Radford High School.

So actually they'll be able to take. Take the class during the school day. They're not at school.

They're not supposed to. So that I think. I'm sorry, that was my point is that without any kind of structure, any kind of oversight, these kind of favoritism issues, it certainly arose. No, no, our scope is very limited. Maybe the superintendent can answer that question. Oh, just kidding.

Anyway, so this who, you know, thing, we suspect it's probably more than just this incident. Incident, because when we talk to other driver education coordinators, how do you select people for, for the class? One person told us, well, I asked the, the teammates of my football, of my son's football team whether they're interested.

So there's other ways that people would be able to get enrolled in a driver education class. That is really not fair. It's not transparent. It's not equal access to all. So that's the point that we're making here, that with a program without that structure, every school was doing it their own way.

And the result of that was inequity was unequal treatment was sometimes favoritism. Not the way a program really should be operated. So one school, casel they did have a wait list. So online, something that you fill out. Not every school maintained a wait list required by DOE rules or policy to have a wait list at every school.

So without a wait list, the Department cannot understand the demand. And that was, I think, one of the Senators concerns about what is the demand for driver education? How can the Department of Education perhaps meet that demand? Kind of. It is aside.

Department of Education charges $10 a student to enroll and participate in Department of Education driver education instruction. If you're not able to take that instruction and you have to go to take driver education in a private. In the private sector, the cost is about $550.

So that $10. Was that the initial amount in 60 years ago?

I believe so, but I'm not 100% sure. I don't think the amount has changed. I'm not sure. Maybe the Department can answer that question better than I can about how long it's been $10. But the difference between the 10 and the 550, it's significant. But without a wait list, it's very difficult to gauge demand.

Some wait lists maintained by coordinators in their head, not on paper. Not some kind of record that somebody could see, not some way that somebody else could determine whether or not they were going down the wait list if there's openings or maybe for future years.

One coordinator told us that people sign up when they're freshme, but she takes the seniors. So in other words, the freshmen eventually may get into the class, but they're going to have to wait a few years before they're able to enroll in the class.

She felt that it was more appropriate, better for her to service the people that were older and not necessarily the people that were younger. That's not a Department policy. That's certainly not in the statute without that structure in the rules. She just made that.

She just made a decision about how she was going to select students to be part of the class.