Communities across the islands are still recovering after the Kona low storms battered Hawaiʻi with heavy rains and flooding.
Among them is Konawaena High School, a school on Hawaiʻi Island that suffered millions of dollars in damages. Severe flooding damaged 75 classrooms on their campus, put 5 elevators out of commission, and impacted their library and administrative offices.
To learn more about their recovery efforts, HPR spoke with Chelsea Qualey, the Konawaena's acting school principal, and Ramzi Mansour, program manager for the West Hawaiʻi District Office for the state Department of Accounting and General Services.
There has been a tremendous effort by construction crews to clear out debris and begin assessing damage as the school rebuilds. And there’s good news — graduation will still be taking place on campus as planned.
According to Qualey, it was a top priority for Konawaena staff to ensure their graduating seniors would have a proper ceremony — especially since that same class held their middle school graduations during the COVID-19 lockdown.
“And so thinking about this really immense opportunity for them, for their senior graduation to be in person, we really prioritized it to make sure that it happened,” Qauley said.
Incidentally, the pandemic learning experience helped Konawaena High staff to pivot towards remote learning in the initial aftermath of the storm.
“We really leaned on the teachers that had participated in distance learning during COVID,” Qualey said. “Our teachers have just been working so hard, and our students are engaging, and it's going very positively, but it definitely took a lot of effort from our entire staff to make that happen.”
Special education classrooms were not impacted, so high needs students were able to continue learning on campus.
Outside of the classrooms, the library on Konawaena campus was severely impacted by the flooding. According to Qualey, it’s expected that all of the books will need to be disposed of and replaced.
The library included several older books on Hawaiian history as well, and efforts are being made to salvage irreproducible and historically valuable books from their collection.
Mansour said a total of 630 cubic yard bins, along with several more from contractors Nan, Inc. and Unitek were sent to the site to gather debris, and that a total tonnage would be reported later with Hawaiʻi Emergency Management Agency. Plans are also underway to update the school’s drainage system to prevent and mitigate future flood damage.
With a swift recovery well proceeding, hope remains high for both the cleanup crew and the school.
“My intent was, from the get go, if you set up the right team and you give the role and responsibility for each team member will succeed,” Mansour said. “So failure was not an option. It was a challenge. But we are taking the challenge and meeting every day now to make sure that progress is happening.”
This story aired on The Conversation on April 30, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
