STAND. COM. REP. NO. 2229

Honolulu, Hawaii

, 2002

RE: S.B. No. 2208

S.D. 1

 

 

Honorable Robert Bunda

President of the Senate

Twenty-First State Legislature

Regular Session of 2002

State of Hawaii

Sir:

Your Committee on Education, to which was referred S.B. No. 2208 entitled:

"A BILL FOR AN ACT RELATING TO EDUCATION,"

begs leave to report as follows:

The purpose of this measure is to require that each public school have a full time vice-principal.

The Department of Education (DOE), Hawaii State Teachers Association, Hawaii Government Employees Association, and a dozen individuals testified in support of this measure.

Under DOE staffing ratios, elementary and intermediate schools with less than five hundred fifty students are not allocated a vice principal position, and statewide, eighty-two public schools are without a full-time permanent vice principal. In these schools, the principal is the sole administrative officer responsible for among other tasks, dealing with staffing and management issues, school security, repair and maintenance, budgets, curriculum, standards implementation, school-based decisionmaking, and student discipline.

Your Committee finds that each public school in the State should have a full time vice-principal to assist in school administration and this measure establishes this requirement. Requiring a vice principal in each school will also help to establish a pool of qualified candidates for principals, for which there is a current and projected shortage.

Your Committee further finds that the DOE requires flexibility in its administrative staffing of schools and that the interests of a particular school and its students may best be served through the services of an administrative officer rather than a vice principal, such as a curriculum leader or an operational officer. Therefore, your Committee has amended this measure to require that each public school have a full time vice principal or, alternatively, a full time administrative officer.

As affirmed by the record of votes of the members of your Committee on Education that is attached to this report, your Committee is in accord with the intent and purpose of S.B. No. 2208, as amended herein, and recommends that it pass Second Reading in the form attached hereto as S.B. No. 2208, S.D. 1, and be referred to the Committee on Ways and Means.

Respectfully submitted on behalf of the members of the Committee on Education,

____________________________

NORMAN SAKAMOTO, Chair