May 13, 2025 Meeting REMINDER in person! @ Kahala California Pizza Kitchen!

Through the genius and generosity of Ellen Shroeder we will convene and discuss the progress and risks to public education over lunch!

See Good News/Bad News notes below on needs, risks, and the recent digital advances by the HIDOE below. We are looking forward to discussion of status and what we can do to protect and support.

Please email Ellen cc me so we can reserve for you. Hope you can come! -Mahalo, Deborah

The Hawai‘i Scholars for Education and Social Justice paper on "The Chronic Underfunding of Hawai‘i’s Public Schools and Related Policy Recommendations"

Should HE‘E distribute, promote this paper?

Hawai‘i Attorney General Anne Lopex is leading a coalition of 20 attorneys general to stop President Trump from shutting down the Dept. of Ed. She said: “The Department of Education is essential, and it cannot be eliminated or incapacitated by the Trump administration without violating federal law,” said Attorney General Lopez. “The 50% cut to the department’s workforce and transfer of department functions to other agencies causes grave harm to our state and our students. We are asking the court to step in to halt the department’s destruction.” Should HE‘E support this effort?

EdTrust's on Hawai‘i Education Funding at Risk Should HE‘E comment on these risks?

Meanwhile.... We have Good News on AI Advances in Hawai‘i DOE Instruction & Administration!

In decades of supporting public schools, I have never seen such rapid use and such rapid uptake of technologies for both admin and instructional use as with the advances in AI! Slides from the HI DOE OCID team are below as well as summaries on some of the technologies being piloted now. Also-- you can follow advances in HI DOE OCID Digital Design Team e-magazine which you can subscribe to. Would you like a leader from HI DOE OCID (Office of Curriculum and Instructional Design) to come to meet with us?

Take a look at the HI DOE Digital Design Team e-magazine ‘ENEHANA! It profiles school innovative uses and "how to's" for parents, community, and students. Click here to flip through the e-book and subscribe on the last page!

AI News from the April BOE SAC meeting: Heidi Armstrong and Teri Ushijima's report to the BOE on AI uses in administration and in learning functions was positive and exciting. It is so hard for overworked school admins and teachers to try new methods and technologies. We heard from principals who extolled the time savings and liability protection advances of using AI to research and report discipline issues. And we heard from teachers about the advances in lab. Here are some of the slides. (The full report is linked in the Board Report section below that I sent before the meeting.)

The list below shows ways some in the HI DOE are beginning to use AI to support admin work quality, depth, and saving time that enables more student contact.

Teacher David Gunderson is able to grade student lab work using AI saving time and delivering greater detail in evaluations. Students use feedback to rework their labs and the AI grading spurs improvements substantially better than teacher grading. Gunderson uses the time he saves to create more activities and to spend more time with students one on one.

Two other applications/platforms with great potential for instructional advances both provide "walled gardens" containing only approved resources for student AI use.

Would you like demonstrations of the new applications?

SchoolAI excels at creating highly interactive, personalized, and student-driven learning experiences with a strong focus on K-12 education, real-time tutoring, and teacher workflow automation. It is especially effective for direct instructional support, formative assessment, and engaging students in active learning environments.

NotebookLM shines as a powerful AI research and note-taking assistant, ideal for synthesizing complex information, supporting higher-level study and research, and enhancing both teacher and student productivity. Its strength lies in organizing, summarizing, and recontextualizing user-provided materials, making it particularly valuable for higher education and advanced learner.

Both tools promote accessibility, collaboration, and AI literacy, but their core instructional benefits are tailored to different educational contexts and needs

Department of Education update on artificial intelligence



The Department supports AI implementation through cross-office collaboration, providing resources and guidance on an AI website (bit.ly/ocid-ai). This includes AI employee and student guidance, professional learning, pilot program access (e.g., MagicSchool), and updates via ʻEnehana magazine (bit.ly/enehana). Ongoing support ensures schools stay current with technological advancements. This presentation will focus primarily on recently developed generative AI that produces new contents or outputs, as opposed to reactive AI that responds to specific inputs or situations without learning about prior experiences (e.g., Alexa), or predictive AI that analyzes historical data and experiences to predict future events or behaviors (e.g., Netflix). 

Slides describing admin uses in addition to learning usages are linked here.

Link to Testimony to Student Affairs Committee

Topics: AI/digital advances by OCID, Financial Literacy, Revision of Vision for Hawai‘i Graduate, School Calendar

Link to Testimony for General Business Meeting

On the Superintendent's Report topics A Federal Impacts, B Transportation, D Legislative Session.

Mahalo for all you do!

Deborah director@heecoalition.org