It’s a little after 8 a.m. and Hawaiʻi schools superintendent Keith Hayashi is walking around a ballroom at the Ala Moana Hotel holding a cup of coffee in his left hand so he can shake hands with his right. It’s a friendly room and he’s a friendly guy. Eh, howzit. Good to see you. Good to see you.
He’s an energetic guy, too. Hayashi says he usually gets up around 5 a.m. and starts on the coffee, which he drinks all day, but he doesn’t have a hyper, over-caffeinated energy like a strobe light. He’s more like an incandescent bulb. No flickers, no sparks, just steady light.
He’s the opening speaker for the gathering of school counselors and advisors who all seem to be wearing black slacks, lanyards and comfortable shoes. Hayashi is wearing a bright yellow Sig Zane aloha shirt, a sartorial choice he made early in the morning to match the school colors of the last school he will visit on this four-campus day.
But first, the welcome speech to the school counselors.
He quotes an adage about working with students: “They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” He thanks the group for “that hope that you provide the students” and for “helping them achieve beyond what they believe for themselves.”
And then he’s out the door and on to the next thing.
Keith Hayashi is a busy man. In a 12-hour day, he might shake hundreds of hands, receive multiple lei, field phone calls, sign papers and miraculously remember the names of dozens of people without hesitation. Some days are all board meetings and legislative testimony, but many days and weekends are racing from one event to another: a robotics championship, an awards program, and then another and another.
The Hawaiʻi Department of Education has more than 160,000 students, over 40,000 employees and 258 school campuses. Hayashi keeps a list of all the schools he’s visited so far since becoming superintendent nearly three years ago. He has about 30 to go.
“If I stay in the office, I get a lot of paperwork and email done, but that’s not what it’s about.”
At 9:30, Hayashi has a school visit scheduled at Keʻelikolani Middle School in downtown Honolulu. He arrives a little early to find Principal Joe Passantino dressed in a Tigger costume. It’s dress-up day at the school, and Passantino, the 2024 Hawaiʻi Principal of the Year, is totally into it.
Passantino unzips his tiger get-up to prove that he has professional clothes underneath, but then he puts the costume back on and bounces up a flight of stairs to give the superintendent a look at a new feature of the school. A classroom on the second floor has been turned into an “Attendance Arcade.” It looks like a Fun Factory at the mall. There are rows of arcade games along the walls and a foosball table in the middle of the room.
The deal is if kids get to school before the bell, they can play games for free. The number of chronic absentee students at the school was at one time over 50%.
Passantino has been implementing programs to get students back to campus, including one based on restorative justice principles as an alternative to suspension, and offering programs on campus until 5:30 every day. During recess, Passantino is often out on the grass in front of the school throwing a football with students.
“Education is about relationships, relationships, relationships,” Passantino says.
Hayashi shakes hands with every teacher and staff member he comes across during the tour. He stops to talk to students. He asks their opinions about things. He does this everywhere he goes. He’ll ask a kid, “What’s the best thing about school?” or “What do you like about this class?” and then he’ll report what the student says to anyone nearby.
A tall kid walks by and Hayashi asks, “Where are you playing football next year?” He’s just guessing, but it’s a good guess.
“Roosevelt, hopefully!” the boy answers.
“Oh, coach Galen is going to be happy to see you!” Hayashi says as the boy stands there grinning.
It’s such a small exchange but it’s thematic to the superintendent: ask a kid what they want to do and then encourage them to do it.
Hayashi graduated from Kaimukī High School in 1983 and went on to the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa. Two years in, he was notified by the school that he needed to declare a major. A friend pointed out that since he enjoyed working with the younger kids in judo, he should consider becoming a teacher.
The friend’s assessment turned out to be spot-on. Hayashi has been a classroom teacher, a district resource teacher, he’s worked at the elementary, middle and high school levels, and served as the Pearl City-Waipahu Complex Area Superintendent.
He became the state superintendent in May 2022. He is most closely associated with Waipahu High School, where he was principal for 12 years.
A visit to Waipahu is next on the agenda. There’s a lot of impressive, innovative programs to see at the school, most of which were Hayashi’s doing, though he gives the current principal, Zachary Sheets, credit for making the newer projects happen.
This part of the day’s schedule is more for my benefit than a to-do on Hayashi’s list, but the campus tour is eye-popping. There’s a new $29 million building that is home to the Natural Resources Academy, where students are involved in projects like growing hydroponic microgreens, building aquaponic tanks for oysters and breeding native tree snails that are extinct in the wild. Upstairs is a beautiful commercial-sized kitchen and dining room where culinary arts students learn skills aimed at getting them a head start in careers in the food industry.
A gleaming new Academic Health Center staffed by nurses and doctors from Hawaii Pacific Health is now across from the front office. Students in the school’s Health Sciences Academy shadow the doctors and nurses as they see patients from the community. One student in the program says she plans to attend Hawaii Pacific University to get a degree in nursing. Another has her sights on Harvard Medical School.
There is much more on the tour, including a print shop, a maker space and an automotive classroom where students learn to work on electric cars, but those things deserve their own feature story. They are a part of Hayashi’s legacy at the school, part of his vision of asking kids what they want to do in the world and “what problems they want to solve” and then giving them access to early college classes and project-based learning.
Hayashi is careful to say this academy model is not what he envisions for every high school in the state. “Every school is different. When I go to a school, I ask, ‘What do you folks need? What can I do to help? What can we do to help the community?’”
From Waipahu, Hayashi drives back to town to testify on education bills being heard at the Legislature. He stops at his office to sign some papers and has a speedy lunch at the conference table that faces The Queen’s Medical Center. He usually doesn’t eat lunch, but today it’s a ZipPac: Fried chicken, breaded fish, teriyaki beef, Spam and a piece of takuan over rice sprinkled with furikake and mac salad on the side.
There is not enough time to eat it all. As he heads out of the office to get to the State Capitol, Nanea Ching, the department communications director, calls him back. “Wait! Check your teeth. Furikake.”
“Oh yeah!” he says, and he takes a swig of water before hustling out the door.
Ching watches the meeting online to hear Hayashi’s testimony. It takes mere minutes and he doesn’t say much besides, “We stand on our written testimony with comments” but it’s important that Hayashi is there in case there are questions, though on this day, there were no questions. The DOE doesn’t have lobbyists. Hayashi has to do the government relations stuff himself.
Ching watches out the window as Hayashi heads back to the office, his yellow shirt moving like a beacon across the lawn.
By 3 p.m., he’s at the Moanalua High School gym for a service awards assembly to recognize the department’s employee, manager and team of the year recipients. It’s kind of like the Oscars for DOE employees, where the nominees’ names are read for each category, and then the winner is announced to lots of cheering.
At every stop in his day, someone gives him a lei, and by now, the pile of lei on the middle console of Hayashi’s car has grown too large, so he moves the flowers to the back seat. He puts on one of the lei hoping that it will suffice, but the woman who greets him at the Moanalua Performing Arts Center insists he have another one.
Hayashi makes his way up to the stage, greeting people left and right as he moves forward. Once on stage, he greets Lt.Gov. Sylvia Luke like they’re old buddies. He passes out awards, poses for pictures, shakes a lot of hands, gives a lot of hugs.
Hayashi grew up the only child of parents who didn’t go to college themselves but told him that he was expected to get his degree. He was a sickly kid who suffered from asthma and various allergies. His parents thought putting him in judo would strengthen his constitution, so enrolled him when he was 5.
It’s an uncanny skill set, this connection he has with people. He remembers things about people’s lives. Small talk doesn’t feel small with him.
The plan seemed to work, and Hayashi grew to love the sport. He continued judo through early adulthood, becoming a certified referee for the International Judo Federation and the highest certified judo referee in Hawaiʻi. He stopped when he became a principal and found himself too busy, but the lessons of the sport remain: maximize efficiency, mutual benefit, resilience, respect and problem solving. He thinks of these as he faces all the things that get in the way of what he wants to do for Hawaiʻi schools.
By 6 p.m., he’s looking for his designated parking spot outside the Mililani High School gym. He drives a newish Lexus SUV from appointment to appointment. I ask why he doesn’t have a driver to help him zip around. He laughs at that idea.
He’s here for the Mililani Complex Choral Festival, in which schools from the district perform in a non-competitive format. There’s Mililani ‘Ike, Mililani Mauka, Mililani Uka, Mililani Waena, Mililani Middle, Mililani High and, as though daring to be different, Kīpapa Elementary. Mililani colors are brown and gold, hence the yellow shirt he chose to wear that day.
He sits close to the stage along with the area’s political representatives: state Sen. Michelle Kidani, looking fabulous in a leather jacket and vintage earrings, Rep. Lauren Matsumoto, looking fabulous in a bright yellow dress, and City Council member Val Okimoto, not in leather or bright yellow but also fabulous.
Hayashi greets them like they’re old friends. It’s an uncanny skill set, this connection he has with people. He remembers things about people’s lives. Small talk doesn’t feel small with him. He’s the opposite of a glad-hander, whatever that might be.
The students all sing well and are cute as can be, but it’s different watching children perform when you don’t have a kid of your own on stage. Hayashi watches the show like they’re all his kids on the stage. He takes pictures and shoots video of the performance. His attention never wavers. He does not check his messages. He beams at the kids and they beam right back. When he applauds for each group, he claps with his hands raised high in praise of the performance.
Hayashi’s wife Donna is a teacher at Waiau Elementary. He says she understands these long days. Their younger daughter is in college at University of California Irvine and their older daughter is a trauma care nurse at Queen’s.
After the show is over, there’s a scrum to get out of the gym, which Hayashi navigates with a great deal of dexterity and a controlled amount of hand-shaking.
It’s after 8 p.m. when Hayashi heads back to town. He doesn’t seem tired, which is good because his day isn’t over. He’s still taking (hands-free) calls in the car. He’ll have to figure out what the cuts to the U.S. Department of Education mean for Hawaiʻi schools, and a bill he was tracking through the Legislature had an amendment tacked on that negates the result he wanted, but he will be back at it the next day.
“It’s like turning a big ship,” he said, describing his mission to guide Hawaiʻi’s public schools. “You can’t do it all at once. It takes time. It’s exciting work.”
Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.
