9 Statements Drew Zero Votes on Hawaii Island

Across 34 public and charter schools on Hawaiʻi Island, 204 education staff ranked 27 statements about a school drug prevention program. Zero votes went to the statement naming Native Hawaiian culture and values. It was the place-based statement, focused on the local culture of the island, that took 19.1% of first-place votes. Teaching the lessons or approving them would fall to these respondents.

Hoʻouna Pono took 15 years to build on Hawaiʻi Island through community-based participatory research, a method putting the community into the design. The finished curriculum amounts to nine lessons of 45 to 60 minutes and 8 videos, aligned to state health standards and taught by classroom teachers. Inside the videos, Hawaiʻi Island youth face drug-related problem situations drawn from their own districts and answer them with an overt refusal or a redirected conversation. An efficacy trial recorded reductions across 3 categories of use, among them e-cigarettes and hard drugs.

When the 204 respondents picked a top 3, the particulars won. Three statements about the material itself led the first-place column: Developmental appropriateness for middle-school youth on the island took 8.8% and video realism took 8.3%. Behind those three came free access to the curriculum on completion of training, at 6.4%. All four leading statements describe something inspectable inside one lesson, in a few minutes of a teacher's time instead of across a semester of evaluation reporting.

Nine of the 27 statements finished at zero across the three ranks. Among them the study lists alignment with the state health standards for grades 6 to 8, together with the flat assertion of a curriculum based on Native Hawaiian culture and values. Marketing departments should study that second failure. Respondents identifying as Hawaiian or Part Hawaiian made up 31% of the sample. Even so, they declined to reward a sentence claiming Hawaiian grounding.

Facing that pattern, a procurement team can write itself a purchasing rule: A supplier line about cultural sensitivity has the shape of the statements at zero. Graded material persuaded these respondents instead, because a buyer can inspect graded material. Printing a label costs a supplier nothing. On that principle, we published how our engines compare and grouped the results by language family.

Teachers called the videos realistic and relatable to island youth. Writers decide realism of that kind at the level of wording. In the idiom of a mainland health video, a refusal will not survive a schoolyard, however the lesson plan frames the culture.

Our team fixed the vocabulary against the master file and produced the numeracy units and learner workbooks in Vagahau Niuē. The team then checked the fields deciding whether a student can act on the page. Afterwards, Niuean-speaking reviewers went through the instruction lines. One of them replaced the English verb Select with Fifili. Further down, another rewrote a set phrase of thanks, assembled in the draft from the wrong words.

Half the sample came from the Kaʻū-Keaʻau-Pāhoa schools, 100 of the 204 respondents. Those schools span about 70 miles of South and East Hawaiʻi Island, across rural districts roughly 100 square miles larger than Oʻahu and Maui combined. In their column the top endorsements were all descriptions of the material itself. The place-based statement took 26 selections. Developmental appropriateness and video realism took 11 apiece. At that distance schools make the choice themselves. The roll of an outer-atoll elementary school governs the future of the atoll on comparable logic.

By contrast, the Hilo-Waiākea schools on the east side, the most populated area with 25 respondents, gave the place-based statement five selections and then produced a five-way tie at two selections apiece, including alignment with the state health standards for grades 6 to 8. The ranking table puts that standards statement at zero across all three ranks, while the study leaves the two accounts unreconciled. A business case built on these numbers should not proceed until the authors say which figure governs.

Teachers made up 55% of the sample. Counselors and behavioral health staff added 14%, principals and vice-principals 11%. At conventional significance two statements separated the roles. Counselors endorsed principal support more than the other groups, at a chi-square of 22.365 and p of .008. For teachers the separating item was active student participation, at a chi-square of 24.757 and p of .003. The people delivering a lesson and the people authorizing it are answering different questions about it.

Enthusiasm averaged 2.79 on the four-point scale, with a standard deviation of 0.80 across 189 usable responses. Only two statements correlated with that rating. Flexible timing and lesson length correlated positively at an r of 0.17 and p of .025. In the other direction the skill-building focus correlated negatively at an r of -0.16 and p of .03. Neither correlation is strong. When the timing was theirs to decide, teachers rated the program higher. A package locked to a fixed sequence loses the person delivering it.

The 27 statements came out of 22 interviews with department staff in the summer of 2016, cut down from 58 candidates under a threshold of two participants for inclusion. There is a step at exactly this point. Corporate teams skip it. A satisfaction questionnaire pushed through machine output and filed as data has not been through instrument design. In national figures substance use among Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander adolescents is understated, because the counts are aggregated with Asian American youth. Mental health data in Aotearoa shows this arithmetic in sharper form.

The authors point the model at other rural and Indigenous settings. The method transfers and the content does not, because the content is the part tied to Hawaiʻi Island. In Samoan or Marshallese the program would need its own situations, filmed with its own young people. Students of the target age would then check the wording against their own speech. Curriculum and literacy localization of that shape is a continuing commission.

Because 93% of respondents had never taught the program, the rankings are anticipations formed from a short overview video instead of judgments earned in a classroom. Fieldwork lasted four academic years, from the 2019-2020 year through the 2022-2023 year. Data collection also spanned the pandemic, with schools shut for two years and a change of state superintendent in the middle of the exercise. By the end of collection several statements had aged, including the one invoking the outgoing superintendent by name. It still drew 4.9% of first-place votes.

Department staff face an allocation problem across the districts. A corporate buyer takes something else from the table. Among the state offices on Oʻahu, 11 respondents split top selections between the place-based statement and the video realism statement. The most isolated schools chose the identical pair. In a rural district and in a state office, material open to line-by-line inspection won the vote. Flexible timing took 7.4% of third-place votes, the highest share at that rank.