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HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES             H.R. NO.              
TWENTIETH LEGISLATURE, 1999                                
STATE OF HAWAII                                            
                                                             
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                     HOUSE  RESOLUTION

RELATING TO REFORM OF THE SCHOOL INSPECTION PROGRAM. 


 1       WHEREAS the children of Hawaii are critical to the future
 2   of Hawaii and are deserving of being educated in a safe and
 3   secure environment; and
 4   
 5       WHEREAS the state School Inspection Program was initiated
 6   for the purpose of insuring safe public school facilities for
 7   children in Hawaii's public school system; and
 8   
 9       WHEREAS recent revelations about conditions at Radford High
10   School have shown that there are flaws with our current School
11   Inspection Program; and
12   
13       WHEREAS current school inspectors are concerned volunteers
14   from the community that receive at most 90 minutes of training
15   before conducting the annual inspection for safety hazards; and
16   
17       WHEREAS the current grading scale used by school safety
18   inspectors ranks each category from 1 to 3, a limitation which
19   leads to vague assessments that do not accurately reflect the
20   true conditions in our schools; and
21   
22       WHEREAS the criteria that are used by the inspectors
23   consist of  categories that are combined together, creating a
24   rating system that skews the results upwards and ultimately
25   obscures where the safety problems are in our public schools;
26   now, therefore,
27    
28       BE IT RESOLVED by the House of Representatives of the
29   Twentieth Legislature of the State of Hawaii, Regular Session
30   of 1999, that the Department of Education is requested to
31   address the problems with the School Safety Program by:
32   requiring that school safety inspectors are professionally
33   trained or certified, changing the grading scale to a five
34   point scale, and by modifying the inspection criteria to
35   disaggregate the results and make them more precise. 
36   
37       BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that a certified copy of this

 
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 1   Resolution be transmitted to the state Superintendent of
 2   Education, and each current member of the Board of Education.
 3   
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 6 
 7                         OFFERED BY:  ____________________________