With a mixture of nervous smiles and tentative steps, about 320 Pahoa students displaced by lava filed into their new schools in Keaau on Friday morning.
With a mixture of nervous smiles and tentative steps, about 320 Pahoa students displaced by lava filed into their new schools in Keaau on Friday morning.
As their buses or personal vehicles pulled up to the entrances of Keaau High and Keaau Middle, the students were welcomed by smiling faces and waves from members of the schools’ communities.
“The faculty came down this morning to greet them, and members of the student body government were up front and wherever they (the new students) got dropped off,” said Keaau High Principal Dean Cevallos.
The former Pahoa High and Intermediate students, some of whom wore their green and white Daggers T-shirts, looked around them as they wandered through the 56-acre campus — considerably larger than their formerly cramped 23-acre plot in Pahoa.
“I was pretty nervous and unsure how it would be here,” said one former Pahoa sophomore girl, who isn’t being identified because the new students’ parents haven’t yet had a chance to fill out media release forms. “Coming in, I didn’t really know how the schedule would work, and I didn’t really know the people.”
A fellow sophomore, however, said she had a bit of an advantage when coming to the new school Friday.
“My family works here, so I already know a lot,” she said.
One of the primary concerns among former Pahoa students has been centered on how their participation in athletics will play out, but the girls said that as volleyball players, they weren’t worried.
Other questions also remain to be answered, such as what diplomas handed out to seniors who graduate this year will say on them — Pahoa, Keaau or a mixture of the two.
The plan Friday was to keep Keaau High’s previous students out another day, providing the new students from Pahoa an opportunity to learn the lay of the land before being overwhelmed by having to fit into the stressful social scene of a large, bustling high school.
“We wanted it to be a day just for them, to get used to the campus when there aren’t 1,059 other kids around,” Cevallos said.
In rotating groups separated by class year, the new students were welcomed by faculty and staff, taken on tours of the campus, and then provided a chance to go through a shortened schedule of their classes to meet each of their teachers and learn their way to classrooms, Cevallos said.
On Oct. 29, the state Department of Education announced the indefinite closure of Keonepoko Elementary, as the campus is estimated to be within the path of the June 27 lava flow — which remained stalled Friday.
Since then, preparations have been made for the transition of those students and others.
On Oct. 30, schools closed for students at Pahoa High &Intermediate, Pahoa Elementary, Keaau Middle, and Keaau High to allow for preparations to receive students attending Pahoa schools that would be cut off to the north of the lava flow once it crosses Highway 130.
About 850 Pahoa students reside north of the flow in the Orchidland, Ainaloa, and Hawaiian Paradise Park neighborhoods and are moving to the Keaau complex to correlating schools.
Meanwhile, about 850 students who reside south of the flow, including at Hawaiian Beaches, Hawaiian Shores, Nanawale, Leilani, Kalapana and Pahoa, will attent Pahoa High &Intermediate or Pahoa Elementary.