Column by University of Hawaiʻi Maui College Chancellor Lui Hokoana was published by The Maui News on September 23, 2023.
As we move through our fall semester, we carry on traveling two parallel paths — supporting our students and supporting our community. Although the sadness remains, we acknowledge that planning for the future is part of the recovery process.
Even as the environment changes on a nearly daily basis, we strive to meet immediate needs. We have learned the importance of being flexible and know whatever we are able to achieve is a direct result of a tireless UH–MC ʻohana and countless community partners and volunteers.
Faculty and staff have been doing direct outreach through weekly in-person visits at the Napili Park Hub since mid-August. These will continue as long as needed.
To date, we have distributed about $800,000 in emergency aid to students from the two Lahaina zip codes. These are students enrolled in any of the UH system’s 10 campuses as well as our own UH–MC students. We will soon get money to students who registered late. We are, obviously, allowing our affected students as much schedule flexibility as possible. Personal support counseling is available to all our campus ʻohana and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
We remain grateful for the incredible efforts of our Culinary Arts Program faculty, staff, students and volunteers as they produce hundreds of delicious meals each day for our displaced neighbors.
Our Library and IT departments are so important in ensuring our students have the course materials and online access they need. One hundred hotspots are working with more to come. There’s a waitlist for those still needing internet access and there’s a list of Starlink locations to help students identify the ones nearest to them. Fifty-five donated laptops have been distributed as have loads of donated, brand new school supplies. Our library staff is happy to receive throughout this semester notebooks, loose-leaf paper, folders, flash drives, pencil cases, index cards and Post-it notes. (Contact the Library at https://maui.hawaii.edu/library/.) Course materials — readings, handouts, assignment information and more — are being printed out and/or put on flash drives ready for students to pick up on campus or in Napili.
More on how to help Maui ʻohana and the Maui wildfires.
In addition to immediate needs, we want our college to be on the leading edge of planning for tomorrow. We have Maui’s only water testing lab and we plan to institutionalize it to expand its reach. We will deploy our Hulihia Center for Sustainable Systems to help with rebuilding by partnering with the UH-Mānoa School of Architecture’s Community Design Center. Assistant Professor of Mathematics Thomas Blamey and the students in his ʻAina Data Stewards Youth Program have worked with Maui United Way on several projects and they will expand that partnership.
“Our current main focus is on ‘food insecurity,’” explained Blamey. “Through this partnership, we are able to leverage Maui United Way’s data to discover insights for the betterment of Maui Nui.”
For more information, visit https://mauiunitedway.org/NASA-Harvest-Project.
Beginning in January, we’ll expand our training programs — apprenticeships in all the construction and automotive trades, career and technical education ranging from nursing and early childhood education to agriculture and natural resources to creative media and everything in between. We’re also hoping to offer innovative, nontraditional pathways and more courses from other UH campuses, specifically in education fields.
We have expanded our partnership with Good Jobs Hawaiʻi.
“We’re identifying training needs for the County and private companies and they’ll be scheduled in the near future,” said Program Manager Nicolette van der Lee.
Hazmat training will be a focus soon. Commercial driver license certification training is ongoing and will ramp up.
“There was already a demand,” said Apprenticeship & Trades Coordinator Michael Young, “and there will be a lot more demand as we rebuild. These jobs provide a good living and will enable drivers to stay on Maui.”
We’ll be holding job and training fairs in October, November and December.
All of this to ensure our college plays a vital role in assisting the thousands of our neighbors left unemployed or underemployed by the wildfires as well as serving our students. We look forward to keeping you informed of our efforts over the next months.
Let’s end with some good news. After years of declining enrollment — here and at colleges nationwide — our enrollment is up 7.5 percent over fall 2022. We have almost 2,700 students enrolled. We exceeded our targets in all but one of six categories. Most notably, we have many more returning students than we expected, many more students taking UH-Maui College classes who are from other UH campuses (up 28 percent), and transfer students (up 54 percent). These statistics translate to promise for Maui Nui’s future.
More details are available on:
- CDL information, https://elwd.maui.hawaii.edu/transportation/.
- Office of Extended Learning & Workforce Development, https://maui.hawaii.edu/elwd/.
- Good Jobs Hawaiʻi, https://uhcc.hawaii.edu/goodjobshawaii/.
- Complete information about UH–MC, http://maui.hawaii.edu/.
* Dr. Lui K. Hokoana is Chancellor of the University of Hawaiʻi Maui College. Kaʻana Manaʻo, which means “sharing thoughts,” is scheduled to appear on the fourth Sunday of each month. It is prepared with assistance from UH-Maui College staff and is intended to provide the community of Maui County information about opportunities available through the college at its Kahului campus and its education centers.
