With students back in school, HPR is featuring a local teacher who has gone above and beyond to nurture young entrepreneurs. Chu Hong has been teaching at Kaimukī High School for 23 years. She started as an English teacher. But her newest pursuit is agriculture.
The idea for a student club came to her during the pandemic when she cultivated her own green thumb. Soon after, she brought her hobby into the classroom and created the Kaimukī W.O.R.M.S. Club three years ago.
But don’t let the name mislead you, there’s much more going on under the soil.
The Conversation recently took a tour of the W.O.R.M.S. Club with Hong. Outside Hong’s old math classroom, student volunteers had just planted a row of anthurium flowers.
“When the club started, we had over 72 kids,” Hong said. “I told boss, I need another room, and I know that lab is open.”
Hong transformed an old science lab into a huge agriculture classroom that consists of a strawberry lab, an aeroponics system, and a soon-to-be microgreen system. Outside is a worm hale.
She has raised more than $100,000 primarily from grant proposals she's written herself to support the club. Hong said her students pushed her to start the W.O.R.M.S. Club
“I said, 'Well, what do you want this club to be? If you guys are serious, come up with all the ideas, because I don't really want to do everything,'" Hong said. “And they said, 'Worms.' I said, ‘Well, should it stand for something, or is that all we're going to do?’ And somebody just said, ‘Yo, I'm going to rap something for you. We offer rich, moist soil.' He didn't even think about it. It just came out. And I said, ‘Oh my gosh, that actually sounds really good, because we're not just doing worms.’”
In addition to worms, composting and gardening, Hong’s W.O.R.M.S Club teaches students about entrepreneurship.
She told HPR that she wants her students to think about an idea and learn how to develop a mission, vision, purpose, and an audience they want to sell an idea to.
“This came as a joke, and I told my students, if you can sell vermicast, which is pretty much worm poop, to someone at a craft fair. … You can sell yourself at a job interview. You could do anything if you can sell trash. And so they took this on as a challenge, and that's kind of where it came from,” Hong told HPR.
“And I think it's everything related to entrepreneurship, from having an idea or having a passion, or networking with people, or saying, ‘How can I get money? How can I get grants, what's out there, who's out there, and how can I make an idea become more than that?' And so it's fertilizing ideas as well. And so I like the idea of this club, fertilizing plants, fertilizing ideas, and eventually we want to use some of our funds to fund our students' projects in entrepreneurship.”
Hong said her students entered the Young Entrepreneurs Program last year, where they came up with something called the Hidden Gems Project, a healthy alternative to gummies.
“The idea behind it is that inside this cube, which kind of looks like a Sugarfina cube, is a little plastic ball, but in it is kohakutou, which is crystal gummies,” she said. “And that is a symbol of our students who are a little bit fragile, who are a little bit rough around the edges, but still super sweet. And they're hidden gems. And I said, this represents a lot of the students here. They're hidden in the middle."
Hong’s students will enter the American Savings KeikiCo Challenge later this year and pitch their idea for funding. The KHS W.O.R.M.S. Club will also be selling their lettuce, gummies, and warm poop later this fall.
This story aired on The Conversation on Aug. 27, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this story for the web.
