Three Hawaiʻi schools each received $5,000 for their campus beautification projects that revamped their schools while bringing in the community.
The winners were the Innovations Public Charter School and Mountain View Elementary School on Hawaiʻi island. Innovations transformed unused fields into communal gardens that provide food for local farmers markets, and Mountain View created a vivid mural based on the story of Pele.
The third awardee was Kalāheo High School on Oʻahu, which built a Hawaiian hale for education and cultural use. It was built traditionally, meaning no nails or screws were used — only lashing, rock stacking, and similar traditional construction methods.
Gregory Wrenn, the president of the board of trustees of the Cooke Foundation, emphasized that the initial motive behind these awards is to help kids bloom by encouraging the mesh of creativity and education.
“If you go back to the basic premise of our awards, they’re based on the idea that kids deserve to be surrounded by beauty. A beautiful environment is much more conducive in letting kids learn and be creative. In these projects, they get to do both,” Wrenn said.
Tara Gumapac, the fine arts department head at Kalāheo, was the project coordinator for the hale. Her pride and passion for the project was evident in her remarks about how it fostered a new appreciation for education, culture, and community.
“To me, it shows that we're stepping in the right direction to reclaim our spaces,” Gumapac said.
“It really was building community through a Hawaiian lens, integrating Hawaiian culture back into the classroom and back into the community so that there’s at least a little bit of Hawaiʻi in everyone that walked away from this.”
Gumapac added that the number of people who showed up in some way to support this project — handling financials and logistics, showing up on workdays to move and stack rocks, providing resources — was in the thousands. She said that simply seeing students and community members show up to help build the hale was enough of an award for her.
The Cooke Foundation has been giving three public or charter schools $5,000 every two years since 2008. Wrenn hopes the money inspires further projects that overhaul the campus, but he said they are free to use it on things like supplies, technology, or whatever they see fit.
“We look straight to the kids in these awards. No matter their background, no matter where they come from, they’re just kids and they’re kids who deserve to learn and grow in areas surrounded by beauty.”
