Gov. Josh Green on Monday signed 16 bills into law designed to enhance the protection and care of keiki and kupuna and to help ensure safety in Hawaii’s schools.
Green called the legislation “a significant step forward in safeguarding our most vulnerable populations — our keiki and kupuna.”
“Our schools need to be safe environments for learning and our kupuna need to have access to the services they need,” he said.
Green emphasized five of the bills during the ceremony at the state capitol in Honolulu.
House Bill 2430 aims to maximize participation in the federal summer electronic benefits transfer (EBT) for children. The measure appropriates $53,500 for the Department of Education and $2.05 million for the Department of Human Services for the current fiscal year, contingent on matching federal funds.
Green credited the “outreach” of the First Lady, Jaime Kanani Green, “and work from our team to get that money, because it’s matched with $18 million dollars in federal funding.”
“So it becomes a $20 million boost for nutrition for our children,” the governor said. “It also aims to reduce hunger and food insecurity in general because, as we all know, in the summertime, when our kids are away from school, it may be the one meal or two meals that they lose.”
Green said that according to the Department of Agriculture, 100,000 Hawaii families will be aided by the summer EBT program.
HB 2400 requires teachers who resign or retire during an investigation into allegations of sexual assault, harassment or physical abuse to forfeit their teaching licenses. The forfeiture must be reported to the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification.
“It ensures the teachers who resigned in lieu of termination would not retain their teaching licenses outside of the state, where they could harm additional students,” Green said. “What the Legislature was saying, in essence, was it’s unacceptable for any teacher who has been accused of a serious misconduct to evade accountability.”
Senate Bill 2475 establishes a “harm to students” registry to prevent school employees, contractors or volunteers who have inflicted harm on students from gaining employment in schools. Reporting institutions must certify due process, consult the registry before hiring and share investigation information. The registry is exempt from public disclosure laws, and institutions must defend and indemnify the Department of Education from related liability.
“It creates additional safeguards for our students (and) maintains safe learning environments,” Green said.
HB 2224 requires the Executive Office on Aging, in coordination with the state Health Planning and Development Agency, to create a comprehensive long-term care plan to accomplish certain long-term care policy goals that ensure the availability of a full continuum of institutional and community-based services for Hawaii’s growing elderly population in Hawaii with disabilities and chronic conditions. The bill emphasizes the preference for home-based care and aims to develop a comprehensive long-term care plan to ensure a continuum of care services. The bill also appropriates $79,872 for this fiscal year to establish a long-term care planner position.
“We have to have a comprehensive plan to know how we’re actually going to provide care in the long-term settings,” Green said. “It is critical because right now, we simply don’t have enough capacity or caregivers to care for our kupuna.”
And SB 2305 establishing statewide “silver alert system program,” similar to the Maile/Amber alerts, with a statewide notification network operated by the Department of Law Enforcement, to alert the public when a senior citizen goes missing.
“If someone’s wandering, if someone’s got Alzheimer’s Disease, if they’re 65 years or older, cognitively impaired, we now have the ability to now go signal this alert and go and save them, or find that individual for our families,” Green said. “It will help give law enforcement a lot of additional immediate information.’
“We’re going to continue to age,” he added. “The population is going to peak or crest around 2030, and then it will come down. And that has a great impact on so many things, because it’s not just those who might be suffering from memory impairment.”
In addition, Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke highlighted a pair of bills related to early childhood education being signed into law.
SB 3087 authorizes early learning programs to be established on public school campuses and other available public buildings.
“It will allow the state to open and operate preschools at libraries. We’re already looking at 2 library sites,” Luke said. “It has the potential to open up preschools at state buildings, whether it’s the state capitol or the Department of Transportation, where the workforce is.
“If you have 3- or 4-year-olds, or if you know people who have 3- or 4-year-olds, go to our website at readykeiki.org and see if there’s a preschool opening next to you.”
And SB 3116 expands the Preschool Open Doors Program, in which asset-limited families receive state funding to send their preschool age children to a private preschool.
“What this law will do — as opposed to having a restricted time period where you can have open enrollment or the open enrollment is already closed — is allow open enrollment throughout the year,” Luke said. “And because of that, a lot more families could qualify.”
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com
