Committees & Teams
Kona Pacific is fortunate to have a sound organizational structure and several dynamic committees and teams that enable the school to function effectively and efficiently. Some of the committees and teams welcome parent involvement. Here is an overview of these committees and teams.
Emergency Response Team (staff committee)
Festival Committee (parent volunteers welcome)
Finance Committee (Governing Board and staff committee)
Governing Board (parent volunteer sought to fill open position)
Hearts & Roses (staff committee)
Leadership Council (staff committee with ‘Ohana Association input)
‘Ohana Association (see under Parents menu)
Outreach Committee described below (parent volunteers sought)
Professional Development Committee (staff committee)
School Guiding Documents Committee (formerly Policies Committee) (parent volunteers welcome)
Hiring Committees - Teacher & Admin (staff committee)
Instructional Leadership Team (staff committee)
School Improvement Planning Team described below (parent volunteers welcome)
Strategic Planning Team described below (parent volunteers welcome)
Living Campus / Site Strategic Planning Group (parent volunteers welcome)
Hawaiian Culture Strategic Planning Group (parent volunteers welcome)
Student Council (parent volunteers welcome)
Wellness Team (parent volunteers welcome)
Outreach Committee
The Outreach Committee is an umbrella committee that is designed to coordinate four crucial functions in the school:
1. Fundraising
2. Grants
3. Soliciting & Receiving Gifts
4. Marketing
This important committee and the work its four functional teams perform on behalf of the school was attempted to be stewarded by the Ohana Association in the 2019-2020 school year, but the individual parent volunteers needed to spearhead this effort did not come forward for this committee to "take off" at the beginning of 2020, when the committee was formed, and then the pandemic hit.
With state income significantly impacted by the pandemic, the Outreach Committee is more important than ever and its importance will increase in the coming years. We urgently need one or more parents skilled in any of the four areas listed above to chair one or more of the functional teams, and other parents to help out in any of the four areas they are interested in. Please let Phil know at philc@kppcs.org if you are interested in exploring joining one or more of the functional teams of the Outreach Committee.
Strategic Planning Team
In early January, 2020 Kona Pacific had its first schoolwide all-day strategic planning retreat. In this retreat attended by parents, board members, faculty, administration, and support staff, three groups formed and met, one group for each of the three key foundational strands underlying KPPCS: Waldorf Pedagogy, Hawaiian Culture, and Sustainable Agriculture / Land Stewardship. At the end of the day each group reported out its visions for the future of Kona Pacific, and the priority of these visions as these had been able to be articulated. Once prioritized, these visions became goals for the school. The KPPCS Strategic Plan 2020-2024 was drafted from the results of this retreat.
A group of enthusiastic parents and staff members carried the impulse born in the strategic planning retreat into a new school team created for this purpose: The Strategic Planning Team (SPT), which is composed of members of all three strategic groups: pedagogy, Hawaiian culture, and sustainable agriculture / stewardship ("living campus"). The SPT met regularly until the pandemic stay-at-home order prevented further in-person meetings.
The KPPCS Strategic Plan 2020-2024 is stewarded and revised as needed by the SPT in conjunction with the Kona Pacific Governing Board (GB). Visions are gathered from all stakeholders, including students, and prioritized by the SPT as part of the master strategic plan, after confirming with the school Guiding Documents Committee that the visions are aligned with the mission, vision, policies, protocols, and procedures of the school. Once the prioritizing of visions into goals for a given time period has been determined by the SPT, when such goals require financial allocation not already budgeted, and/or are major shifts in the life of the school, these are presented to the GB with the recommendation for implementation in the timeframe suggested by the SPT. The GB then decides which goals to support financially in the coming year.
In its meetings in the winter of 2020, three main strategic priorities were articulated:
1. The incorporation of Hawaiian cultural elements into the 2020 May Day festival. (This didn't involve any allocation of funds and it wasn't a major shift in the school. The festival was cancelled due to COVID-19.)
2. Establishing a Hawaiian Cultural Practices Program to replace the Arts Program active at the time. (This was a major shift in the school and involved non-budgeted funds, and was approved by the GB - see below.)
3. Site improvements to be clarified by the Living Campus group. (This was already budgeted and didn't involve a major shift in the school.)
The recommendation for establishing a Hawaiian Cultural Practices Program to replace the Arts Program in the 2020-2021 school year was presented to the Governing Board as this constituted a major shift for the school and it involved hiring a new Hawaiian Program Coordinator, a major non-budgeted expense for the school. Given the importance of Hawaiian culture in the life of Kona Pacific, this recommendation from the SPT was approved by the GB. See Hawaiian Culture under the Programs menu for more details.
Later in the spring of 2020, given the distance learning / stay-at-home mode the school was in, and the anticipation that the pandemic was not going to go away anytime soon, it was determined by a working group of the SPT that the strategic vision / goal of the creation of a new school website had become a high-priority strategic goal for the school, and this was also recommended and approved by the GB. This was both a major shift for the school and involved allocating funds not already budgeted. This website is the result of that process!
If you would like to join the Strategic Planning Team, please contact Phil at philc@kppcs.org.
School Improvement
Planning Team
Kona Pacific Public Charter School is a "Title 1" school, meaning that a certain percentage of our students (this year >47%) qualify for free and reduced-cost meals per federal guidelines. As a Title 1 school, we are eligible for supplemental funding from the federal government, but to receive this funding we must meet certain criteria, among which are (1) using research-based strategies to improve student achievement and, (2) practicing strategies to support / encourage parent involvement in the school. The process for verifying that we are meeting these requirements is quite complicated and beyond the scope of this section.
In the winter of 2020, as the Strategic Planning Team (SPT) was engaged in its work of articulating the highest priority strategic visions / goals for the 2020-2021 school year (see above), it became clear that in order to meet the requirements of Title 1, the strategic group for the pedagogical strand of the school would have to be formed as a formal separate group called the School Improvement Planning Team (SIPT). In alignment with federal guidelines and our own best practices, the SIPT needed to include teachers, administrators, parents, and, ideally, students. We formed the Kona Pacific SIPT in February, 2020 and met regularly through June 2020 following a detailed plan for formulating the academic goals for the school for the coming three years (2020-2023). This process resulted in four official documents that were approved by the KPPCS Governing Board in July 2020:
1. Our Comprehensive Needs Assessment (CNA), which identifies:
a. our student performance challenges, i.e., the challenges our students are facing in achieving their highest potential academically in our school, based on state and school assessment data and the trends these indicate over the last three years;
b. the root causes for these performance challenges stemming from the school (rather than from the students themselves);
c. our academic goals for our students over the next 3 years; and
d. our strategies for addressing the root causes of the student performance challenges, which we feel will enable our students to achieve the academic goals we have for them over the next 3 years.
2. Our Comprehensive Academic Plan (CAP), formerly known as our "schoolwide plan", which details our major improvement strategies that were presented in our CNA, and outlines the "key actions" for each strategy that will enable us to achieve our academic goals for the next 3 years.
3. Our Detailed Implementation Plan (DIP), which is a detailed spreadsheet showing timelines, progress, etc. for our achieving our "implementation benchmarks" for our key actions in our CAP.
4. Our Fiscal Requirement Form (FRF) which is our detailed budget for how we will spend the federal funds we receive to achieve our academic goals for the next 3 years.
If a Title 1 school shows low student achievement scores on the annual statewide academic assessment test (known in Hawaii as "Smarter Balanced") over a period of time, the school may be designated as a CSI (Comprehensive Support and Improvement) school, which entitles the school to receive significant additional federal funds to remedy the situation. Kona Pacific became a CSI school in 2017, and received significant federal funds over 3 years, 2017-2020, to address the academic challenges that we felt were impacting our students in this timeframe, and their root causes. In the second year of this 3-year period our student state test scores showed significant improvement, and as a result we were scheduled to be removed from CSI status, and CSI funding, as of June 30, 2020. However, the pandemic prevented the state of Hawaii from administering the Smarter Balanced tests in the spring of 2020. These test results were anticipated to confirm the positive trend in our students' academic achievements indicated by the 2018-2019 test results. As a result of not being able to take the 2019-2020 statewide assessment, KPPCS and all other Hawaii CSI charter schools had their CSI status extended 1 year.
Because of this development, we found ourselves eligible to receive CSI funds one more year, i.e. in the current 2020-2021 school year. To be eligible to do so, the SIPT had to create a crucial fifth document in addition to the four described above, called the CSI Application. This was approved by the GB and submitted to the Federal Programs Team of the State Charter Commission in October. We were informed in December 2020 that our CSI Application was approved.
The School Improvement Planning Team will continue its work on behalf of the strategic academic goals of the school, as outlined in the CNA, CAP, DIP, and FRF, for as long as Kona Pacific is a Title 1 school. If you would like to join the SIPT to help us with this important work, please contact Phil at philc@kppcs.org.
Resources
Alliance Core Principles
