New Legislative Bills Seek to 
Expand SFA's Scope and Authority

Faster, more cost-efficient, and more responsive. These seem to be the watchwords in bills involving the Hawai‘i School Facilities Authority (SFA) this legislative session. SFA hit the ground running when the session kicked off on Jan. 21, and has been working at full throttle.

SFA has been actively monitoring a number of legislative bills this session and has been supporting two companion bills, HB1783 and SB2024, relating to charter school facilities. These bills are designed to provide cost savings for the state, and meet the urgent, growing demand for new schools in certain geographical areas at an accelerated pace without sacrificing quality of design.

Public-Private Partnerships
Admittedly, it's a tall order, but the legislature has shown their bold commitment to visionary thinking and willingness to try new approaches to building school facilities. These bills would require SFA to launch a pilot program using public-private partnerships or P3s to develop three new public schools in communities where there is a greatest need.

The approach provides faster delivery, predictable costs, and long-term accountability for facility upkeep. The P3 model avoids the chronic challenge of deferred maintenance of Hawai‘i schools because of the lack of state funds and instead provides a financially self-sustaining model.

Others in the community agree. Organizations that testified in support of the bills included: HawaiiKidsCAN; HCAN Speaks!, the advocacy arm of Hawai‘i Children’s Action Network; Hawai‘i Technology Academy; and the State Public Charter School Commission.

“Hawai‘i continues to face some of the highest public school construction costs in the nation. These escalating costs make it increasingly difficult to provide adequate educational facilities for students, particularly in communities experiencing enrollment growth and capacity constraints,” Riki Fujitani, SFA executive director, wrote in his testimony supporting the proposed legislation. “At the same time, traditional school delivery timelines are often too slow to respond to urgent needs. Overcrowding, aging infrastructure, and rising costs require that the State to explore new approaches that are both efficient and accountable.

Fujitani noted that other states have successfully used public-private partnerships to accelerate school delivery that Hawai‘i can follow. For example, Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland delivered six new public schools through a long-term P3 model that bundled design, construction, financing, and maintenance into a single performance-based agreement.

Modernizing Schools Starts with a

Centralized Database for Better Decision Making

SFA is supporting other bills, HB1778 and SB2550, which relate to modernizing schools. The bills require SFA  to establish a school modernization initiative through a capital improvement project planning database for school facilities statewide.

Modernization decisions involve high-cost, long-lived building systems that are critical to school operations and safety. These decisions are most effective when guided by centralized, condition-based data rather than isolated or site-specific requests.

A centralized, data-driven capital improvement project planning database organized by legislative districts will support this approach and enable more informed, equitable, and transparent decisions on facility upgrades, new construction, and resource allocation statewide.

This database would provide the Legislature, Governor, Board of Education, Department of Education, SFA, and the public with data and information to help answer fundamental questions relating to a school’s capital improvement budget. The increased transparency will enable Hawai‘i residents to know which projects in their district have been funded and how those projects are progressing. 

Both the Hawai‘i State Teachers Association and the HCAN Speaks! supported this bill.