 Aloha and welcome to Ehana Kako. We're here every week on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. I'm Kili Akeena, president of the Grassroot Institute. Well, certainly education has been in the news quite a bit this year, particularly because of some of the things that are completely new educational savings accounts, for example, or every student succeeds act. What do these terms mean? They're changing the landscape on education here in Hawaii. But one other thing everybody knows is that education is a hot topic in a way that we really are not interested in, and that is the temperature of the rooms. We don't want to see the temperatures rising by degrees. We want to see our kids getting degrees. Forgive that pun, but lately a lot of legislation is filled with puns, such as cool schools and so forth. We're going to talk a bit about that today with a couple of the researchers at the Grassroot Institute who are specializing in educational topics. Delighted to have joining us today a couple of gentlemen who pour themselves into going over legislation, looking behind the scenes, getting out there in the schools, and finding out what's really going on. We're going to learn a lot from them. Aaron, I want to welcome you to the program. Aaron Leef, good to see you. Thank you for having me. Well, thank you very much. In addition to Aaron, we've got Matthew Reed, Matthew. Thank you for having me on the show. Thank you for being on the program. Both of you guys are working very hard at Grassroot. Having fun? Yeah, enjoying it so far. Well, I'm glad to hear that. Let's start off right at the beginning here. We've heard a lot of talk about cool schools and this year the legislature appropriated $100 million to cool the classrooms. Maybe you can keel us in a little bit, Aaron, on what's going on in terms of the temperature of our classrooms. Right. Well, as you said, the schools have been very hot, with some schools reaching 108 degrees, real feel 133 degrees. And so the government had to step in. They had to do something. So first they gathered estimates on how much they thought it would cost to cool a thousand classrooms. And the estimates were around $20,000 to $40,000. Okay. So this is originally what we thought we would have to pay in order to bring down the temperature of the classrooms. Correct. All right. That sounds pretty acceptable, but what happened after that? Well, once the bit sheets were put out, the estimates came in. And the cheapest estimate that Matt and I found in our research was $101,000 per classroom. Per classroom. Let's just take that as the cheapest one. So instead of just going down to a hardware store or one of the big box places and buying an air conditioner and installing it, we'd have to pay $100,000 plus per classroom at the low end. Now take us to the high end. So the high end, we saw bids at $1.8 million. And again, we're talking about a single classroom. It's just ridiculous. Let me back up. Single classroom, you're talking $1.8 million. You're talking about a classroom for about 500 students? Oh, no, not 500. Not an auditorium. They're not in college yet. We're talking about a small classroom for about 30 students. Yes. I believe in Hawaii the ratio, average ratio is one teacher to 16 students. Okay. So maybe 16 students, 20 students or so in that classroom, $1.8 million in order to air condition it. Gentlemen, what's going on? So what we've seen here is actually a subversive attempt either by someone from either the state legislature or within the government bureaucracy, somewhere between the Senate bill that passed that appropriated $100 million to cool these schools. And the ultimate conclusion where we now have these bidsheets coming out with $1.8 million bids is this insertion of this massive energy infrastructure update, which they essentially snuck into the legislation. Let me see the anatomy here. So the legislature appropriates $20 million. $100 million. $100 million. It goes out through the schools, which is part of the administration. Bids are asked for. And how much in total do the bids add up to that are coming in? Well, even if we took the cheapest bid and assumed that was the average, that would be over $100 million. If we took the most expensive bid, that would be about at least a billion dollars. A lot. A billion dollars. At least. What we're looking at, if the bids remain around $100,000 or even if they end up being slightly less than that, just judging by the initial estimates and considering that the legislature originally appropriated $100 million to cool the number of classrooms that were provided for originally, with them costing five times as much, we're going to see that number balloon to perhaps half a billion dollars or maybe even more. Well, this is incredible now. So first of all, there is a disconnect between what the intention of the legislature was and what the authorization was and the receiving back of the bids. Now, the natural thing people say is that there's all of this construction taking place in Kaka'ako. We have more construction going on than at any other time in the history of Hawaii. Our resources are strapped. The market is hot. Forgive the pun again. And as a result, the cost of construction, the cost of materials, the cost of labor, the cost of acquiring these air conditioners has gone through the roof, through market factors. So it's the free market that's at fault over here. Is that your analysis, gentlemen? I would heavily disagree with that. Yeah, but our businesses, contractors and others supposed to be greedy. And so they're gouging the public. This is part of the press that has been coming out on this. But it seems like you gentlemen don't agree with that. Well, it seems like they're just doing what the bids sheets asked for. But the problem is that the bids sheets that were provided are covering something much larger than what we wanted them to do. What we wanted were cool schools. However we got there, that was what we wanted. But instead we saw this inclusion of this vast update of the energy infrastructure of Hawaii through the installation of microgrids in every school. Let me stop you there for a moment, because I want to make sure that we understand the anatomy of what's going on. Legislators said, spend $100 million, cool the schools. They responded to what the schools were asking for. And that was supposed to be able to satisfy the need. People were not dumb. They understood what the market cost of air conditioners was. But when this bill went into law and became action from the legislature to the administrative side, something changed. It's no longer a bill or a law for installing air conditioners. You're using a term here. You're saying the bids sheets, which you gentlemen have read, are actually calling for microgrids. And you've used another term, energy infrastructure. So this is different than just putting air conditioners in. Can you explain what a microgrid is and what this energy infrastructure is that these bids cover? Well, essentially, and to be clear, when I first read microgrid, I also didn't know what it was. So I had to go find this information on my own. The exact language is mini microgrid. I called up some specialist at UH who had not heard the term mini microgrid. So I can't speak on what a mini microgrid is, but a microgrid is essentially a self-sustaining power plant. A power plant? Okay. Now, you're not talking about something that sits next to your computer in case the lights go out and keeps your computer running. You're talking about something far more substantial. Right. It's not merely a battery system. It's basically an energy infrastructure that is able to give and take with the energy infrastructure, the grid, that's already in place statewide. But the other function that it has is that it is able to independently survive in the event of a critical infrastructure failure, which is why this project is so extraordinary because the kinds of places where these microgrid projects are usually implemented are places like prisons and hospitals and large universities and isolated areas, military bases. These are hardened installations that must survive in the event of some electrical failure, not air conditioners at a public middle school or high school. That's not a critical infrastructure. It sounds like it's a little bit overkill. It certainly is. It sounds like we're trying to set up something that is required in critical places such as at the police headquarters and so forth, but not necessarily in a classroom. Why is this happening? Well, I can't speak on why I don't know the motivations, but microgrids are a first step towards what I imagine is a bigger picture in green energy. And what I mean by that is that each microgrid would be able to function in a way that it would decide how to utilize green energy in the areas around each school. So it wouldn't just be the school. The community around the school would now be able to use this microgrid as well. And I imagine that's the end goal. It's not about specifically cooling the schools. So when we take a look at the fact that schools are distributed throughout the state, they are in all communities for the most part. If they were to turn into microgrid power, what do we call them? Microgrids. Microgrids, if they were to turn into these power plants, so to speak, they could actually redesign. They could actually transform the energy grid for all of Hawaii. Is that what you're saying? That's correct. And microgrids, they're emerging. We don't know a lot about them, but the fact of the matter is that this was supposed to be a bill to cool schools, and now we're seeing it's been hijacked by a very expensive system. Now let me see if I understand what's going on here. The legislature is not getting what it ordered. Instead, it's been substituted with part of a process to go somewhere else, an agenda to get green energy microgrids all across the state, which may be a good thing, may not be a good thing, but whatever it is, it's not what the law really was going after. You've read the law. You've read it carefully. Both have. So where are these microgrids in the law? Nowhere. The only mention that they have of anything close to microgrid is one line that says the air conditioners, putting air conditioners in a thousand classrooms across the state cannot have a big impact on the energy bill. Now that can be interpreted in many ways. Precisely. That doesn't mean you set up this brand new energy infrastructure. Right. And one of the things that we discovered is, for example, the plan also involves the installation, of course, because somewhere in the energy infrastructure mix, they have to install air conditioners because that's what the bill required. So they're going to go with photovoltaic air conditioners, which are solar powered ACs, which are a very sensible way to create power in an energy efficient way. They're slightly more expensive to install, but they operate at a much lower cost in the long term. But those can exist independently of the mini microgrids that they're attempting to put into this plan. So the fact that they didn't just go with the photovoltaic air conditioners and get rid of the microgrid portion when this was implemented and when these bid sheets went out is just baffling. So the costs would be dramatically lower, closer to what the legislature expected if we weren't setting up this brand new energy infrastructure. Correct. The last question before we go to a break is, is it necessary to redo the entire energy infrastructure in order to install air conditioners in classrooms? Well, I couldn't necessarily speak to I mean, certainly it's something that could be beneficial. But the biggest thing that bothers us at the grassroots institute, as I'm sure you may know, is government transparency and accountability. I may know that. And this is a very untransparent, quite opaque effort because what we saw here was they hijacked an initiative, which was meant to cool the schools and are using it to cool the schools, but also to please the green energy lobby and to please their friends in the industry. And that's just simply not okay. Well, if the solution is what the people ordered, if it's what the legislators ordered and what the governor signed off on, that would be fine. But what's going on here is they're getting something that they didn't ask for. Somebody has been pulling the wool over the public's eyes. And you know, that's one of the things that we look at at the grassroots institute and I hope that you enjoy this insight uncovered by two of our researchers. In a moment we're going to come back and talk about some other issues related to education, some of the new acronyms like ESSA, which are a little bit baffling, but don't go away. I'm Kaley Iakina with the grassroots institute, featuring a couple of our researchers, Aaron Leif and Matthew Reed. And we'll be right back on the ThinkTekowahi broadcast network after this short break. Hi, I'm Ray Starling and I am co-host for Hawaii's Wednesday afternoon state of clean energy. And with me today is Leslie Cole Brooks and she's going to tell you what's happening this month with our shows. Hi everybody, I'm Leslie Cole Brooks, the executive director of the Distributed Energy Resources Council. And this month is the focus on Distributed Energy Resources. We just had a great show on smart grid technologies and the rest of the month we're going to discuss storage, different strategies, microgrids, and then we're going to have live man and woman on the street from Verge. So it's really exciting, very informative, lively, and just worth doing. So see you next Wednesday. Aloha and welcome to ThinkTekowahi. I am Ina Chang. I am the guest host for Small Business Hawaii with Reg Baker. Tune in every Thursday at 2pm and watch us. Aloha. Welcome back to Ehana Kako here every week on the ThinkTekowahi broadcast network. Again, I'm Kay Lee Hakeena, president of the Grassroot Institute and it's my pleasure to have Matthew and Aaron here who are researchers, experts at what most people don't know about education behind the scenes, what's taking place. But before we continue, I want to say mahalo to the ThinkTekowahi staff. Just tremendous people under the leadership of J. Fidel putting out maybe 35 or more hours a week of original content from downtown Honolulu. You see downtown Honolulu behind me, where we have the offices of the Grassroot Institute as well as ThinkTekowahi. Well, back to our fascinating show. You've probably all heard the acronym by now, ESSA, Every Students with Seeds Act and maybe you've just learned that right after having mastered, no child left behind. So this is another government handed down acronym here and let me just ask Matthew if you'll just let us know exactly what is ESSA. So I think the best way to talk about ESSA is to compare it to No Child Left Behind or NCLB. And essentially the biggest change that we've seen is a return to more local control and more local autonomy over the school system. However, the specifics of that in terms of how it's going to be implemented in Hawaii have not been worked out quite yet. And one of the problems with No Child Left Behind, the complaints that came from principals and teachers that they were spending so much time in paperwork that they weren't able to fulfill the educational mission as fully. And secondly, that they didn't have the level of control at the local level to even to customize it enough that educators really need to have. Right. And one of the things that did change was a greater focus on states and localities developing their own educational standards. And that's something that has been precisely with the ESSA as opposed to the NCLB which imposed a top down system of educational standards across the entire country applied completely uniformly and with no exception. Now you were at a function with Governor E. Gay in which he was addressing a group of educators and public policy makers at the Hawaii Convention Center. What are some of the takeaways you learned there with regard to ESSA for Hawaii? Well I would say the biggest takeaway is teachers are generally a lot more pleased with this than they are with NCLB. There was a teacher that I listened to who was giving a talk about some of the changes and she referred to No Child Left Behind as No Child Left Untested and was praising the new changes in the ESSA which gave a little more flexibility in terms of how to assess students as a really landmark change but of course it remains to be seen exactly what Hawaii decides to do. We're in some pretty exciting times right now as the state moves to implementation. Now I understand at the convention many of the broad strokes were addressed such as more power back at the local level and more decision making and so forth but there weren't necessarily a lot of specifics that have been parsed out yet. What are some of the specifics that we are aware of right now? Some of the nuts in the bolts. Well one of the things that surprised me was how there are a lot of similarities with No Child Left Behind in the ESSA which flies in the face of some of the praise of the ESSA for example. So there are a lot more alike than people may realize. Right. The NCLB provided for, required the federal government to intervene if a school was underperforming. There was some sort of graduation rate threshold and some other thresholds that would be used in order to determine whether federal intervention was necessary. With the ESSA, those sort of thresholds still exist. They may be lowered for certain schools and so states have more of the onus to go out there and fix broken schools but the feds are still there waiting if the state doesn't pick up the slack. The level of federal intervention as opposed to state autonomy is not clear yet. Right. And it certainly has been dialed back in terms of federal standards and federal involvement but there's still a very strong federal presence over education. I mean of course the first thing we have to realize is the ESSA was a federal piece of legislation. So the feds are still having their way with education but they are giving a little more control back to localities and states. You were talking about testing before which was used really as a metric for determining everything from authority to budgeting and so forth and not only were teachers complaining about that in terms of their workload but many parents have complained that under no child left behind their kids were over tested. How is that likely to be impacted by the ESSA? So I'd say there's two pieces of assessment. There's the student assessment and there's the teaching assessment. A lot of teachers are very happy that the teaching assessment is changing. There is a lot more flexibility for states to determine their own ways of evaluating teachers under the ESSA. As far as student assessments are concerned those remain largely the same in a lot of ways. There's more flexibility offered as to how you'd like to offer the tests or administer them if you want to do them in multi sort of small tests broken up over multiple months or whether you want to administer this test or this test but besides that things are largely the same. Assessments are still required and so the changes there have been much more gradual. Hawaii's Department of Education has come under criticism over the past many years for changing the metrics on testing. Sometimes standards are not met and the standards get changed by changing the type of testing. It sounds to me as though the prospect of this happening hasn't gone away that there still is room for politicization of this. Oh absolutely and I think I mean of course with the return of more power to states and localities with education you're going to see more power in states and localities to determine what they want to do and that includes state education interests, teachers unions and large organizational interests within the educational bureaucracy that have their own agendas that they want to advance. So obviously just by the mere fact of the devolution of that power they're going to have a lot more influence and say over what's going on. It sounds to me that you think that the verdict is still out that we're going to have to see how this works out that while it's positive that we're bringing power back down to the state level from the federal level we're not so clear as to what the state itself is going to do with that power. Exactly and I think it's going to vary based on every state and I think that's going to be the biggest mystery of ESSA is determining what is Hawaii going to do next. Well thank you Math for looking into that. I know Erin at the same time has been looking into educational savings accounts and for us that's an interesting concept because it changes the landscape a bit in terms of the choices that parents have for the education of their children but one of the concerns we've had here in the state of Hawaii is that frankly there has been one choice send your kid to this school or send him to a private school unless you get an exemption to send him to or her to a different district but this educational savings account concept might impact that. First of all define it for us Okay well in education savings account is it's pretty much exactly what the name describes. It's a restricted use savings account which means that the bank when the account is set up with the bank the bank sets in place restrictions that they can only be used on educational services and so to understand how the ESSAs receive their money you have to understand how the Department of Education funds Hawaii schools. Alright explain that So each student has a essentially a price tag attached to there when they go to a school. In Hawaii the cost of pupil funding is $11,823 per student. Alright So if your child goes to Farrington High School then Farrington gets $11,823 for your child attending Now currently if you take your child out of public school and put them in private school the state still gets that $11,823 and now you're also paying for private school. Alright What education savings accounts do is they give the parents that $11,823 dollars that would follow the student and they can spend it on private school, tutoring, home based learning. There's really no limit as long as it's an educational good or service. So in other words the market would work. In a school that had something to offer a certain parent set of parents certain student would receive their funding and so schools would become responsive to the needs of parents and the needs of students Is that how it works? Yes, this is actually the most important factor in education savings accounts and at least in regard to Hawaii in the state of Hawaii you are stuck in your district. Now I know there's geographical exceptions where you can apply to send your child to a school in a different district but growing up in Hawaii my parents applied for geographical exceptions all the time and I was never approved. We actually ended up moving from district to district so that they could get me into the school that they wanted me in. Well that's incredible that I was just to give you the education that was appropriate to you. Correct. Now how does this concept differ from what is called school vouchers? Okay so the biggest difference between this and a voucher is that the voucher would go directly from the government to the educational service school that the students going to. In education savings accounts the money goes to the parent and the parent controls it and there are way more options. It's in fact limitless in regards to education. Now this would be frightening to people who want to tell parents what choices they should make or people who sit in the bureaucracy and say they know better than the public because it actually allows the public to make decisions based on choice so what do you have to say to people who argue well you know the public they're not that smart. Parents they really don't know a lot about education and so as a result they're going to make bad choices for their kids and so the state needs to retain the power to determine who gets what kind of education. Well I guess the response that I would have to that is based off of research students that go to private school score 20% higher and almost every single category. So but parents might not know what's best but there are schools out there full of teachers and administrators that parents could talk to and learn more about and then decide which school they want their child to go to. Real quickly as we look at the research around the country is this working in other parts of the nation? The short answer is yes. Now in Nevada ESAs were just implemented and in Nevada the student gets 10% of the per people funding. The other 10% returns to the school district that they would have gone to. In Hawaii these would work even better because the per people funding in Hawaii is 11,823. The average cost of private school in Hawaii is $7,500 a year. Well that's incredible. Well we could keep talking about this but you've raised some intriguing concepts here particularly that parents could have greater choice and with that greater choice could actually create a more efficient responsive school system based upon the free market. I want to thank you both for being here today and appreciate all of your work at the Grass Root Institute. My guests today have been Erin Leif and Matthew Reid at the Grass Root Institute working very hard researching topics that will hopefully translate into good policy being made by our legislators and by voters. Thank you very much for watching with us today and we look forward to hearing more from you. You can contact us at grassrootinstitute.org. I'm Keeley Akinna with the Grass Root Institute saying thank you to the Think Tecawaii Broadcast Network for another edition of the Honokanko Owa.