\n<\/p>\n
A<\/span>dvocates for a private school system established to educate Native Hawaiians say a new lawsuit targeting the admissions process is an ugly attempt to ignore the wishes of a Hawaiian princess who bequeathed her inheritance to secure a brighter future for her people nearly 140 years ago.<\/p>\n The Kamehameha schools were established in the will of Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the great-granddaughter of Kamehameha I and the last royal descendant in the Kamehameha line. At the time of her death in 1884, the princess\u2019s estate held about 9% of the island chain\u2019s total acreage.<\/p>\n Her will established the Kamehameha schools using those lands and property to endow them. Today, the system encompasses three campuses for K-12 education and 30 preschools that focus on Hawaiian culture-based education. The schools educate about 5,400 students across all grades and have an endowment of about $15bn, a figure greater than all but about 10 of the country\u2019s most elite universities. The schools take no money from the federal government.<\/p>\n Entrance is highly competitive at all grades, with only about one in five students being accepted at the high school. Kamehameha schools also subsidize about 92% of the cost of educating their students, with almost 80% of the student body also getting some kind of financial aid based on need.<\/p>\n Jon Osorio, the dean of the Hawai\u02bbinui\u0101kea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawaii, said the Kamehameha schools were established at a time when the Native Hawaiian population was still on the decline. In the late 1880s, about 50,000 Native Hawaiians were estimated to live on the islands, down from a high of between 300,000 to half a million people at the time of contact with Europeans.<\/p>\n \u201cThe kingdom itself was really in a precarious kind of place, particularly because the United States was becoming more and more interested in securing a permanent base at Pearl Harbor,\u201d Osorio said. \u201cThe kingdom\u2019s precariousness and not really seeing the long-term fate of the Hawaiian nation was one of the things that led the princess in thinking she did not want her people to be left behind.\u201d<\/p>\n Osorio said throughout the 20th century, \u201calmost everything Hawaiian was being marginalized or even eliminated, or very actively suppressed\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIn that period of time, the Kamehameha schools was really the only thing that we had,\u201d Osorio, an alumnus of the schools, said. \u201cThe institution that we had, that was just for us, and had the potential at least of keeping us abreast of the rest of the population.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, almost all of those enrolled at the schools have Native Hawaiian ancestry. But the new suit, filed in district court in Honolulu, says that is unfair.<\/p>\n The lawsuit was launched by a group called Students for Fair Admissions, a neoconservative non-profit based in Virginia that has for years waged a legal battle against affirmative action and race-based admissions practices. The group sued Harvard in 2014 and ultimately secured a landmark supreme court ruling in 2023 that saw the conservative supermajority end race-conscious admissions in higher education across the nation.<\/p>\n A website launched last month as a precursor to the Kamehameha schools suit notes that while it is a \u201cgreat school system\u201d, the schools\u2019 \u201cadmissions policy expressly prefers students with Native Hawaiian ancestry over non-Native Hawaiian students\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIn fact, that preference is so strong that it is essentially impossible for a non-Native Hawaiian student to be admitted to Kamehameha,\u201d Students for Fair Admission says. \u201cWe believe that focus on ancestry, rather than merit or need, is neither fair nor legal, and we are committed to ending Kamehameha\u2019s unlawful admissions policies in court.\u201d<\/p>\n The kingdom\u2019s precariousness \u2026 was one of the things that led the princess in thinking she did not want her people to be left behindJon Osorio<\/p>\n The effort is led by Edward Blum, a conservative activist who has led groups that have filed more than a dozen lawsuits challenging the use of race in education, business and across cultural bodies.<\/p>\n Blum did not reply to the Guardian\u2019s request for comment. He told the New York Times that while the group supported the Kamehameha schools\u2019 mission, their offerings should be available to all Hawaiians, \u201cnot just those with a specific genetic background\u201d.<\/p>\n Eujin Park, an assistant professor at the graduate school of education at Stanford University, said the lawsuit targeting the Kamehameha schools was a striking example of how the fight to roll back civil rights-era legislation and policies to support equal opportunity in schools had moved from the battleground of higher education to K-12.<\/p>\n Park said conservative groups had targeted Harvard \u201cvery specifically\u201d a decade ago.<\/p>\n \u201cI think they\u2019re targeting the Kamehameha schools because they are a very uniquely situated school,\u201d Park said. \u201cMuch like the way they chose Harvard very specifically, because it\u2019s such an elite space, because it\u2019s so famous, and because \u2026 what we know as affirmative action \u2026 was modeled after the Harvard admissions plan.\u201d<\/p>\n Park said even though affirmative action had its critics as a fairly limited tool to expand education opportunity and access, \u201cit was an important tool in the toolbox\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was part of this wider range of policies available to schools and universities to expand access and to build a more just education system,\u201d she said. \u201cTo lose that tool, it\u2019s incredibly harmful.\u201d<\/p>\n Crystal Kauilani Rose, the chair of the board of trustees at Kamehameha schools, spoke about that legacy in front of the landmark \u02bbIolani Palace in Honolulu on Tuesday.<\/p>\n Rose said the princess\u2019s mission to uplift Native Hawaiians \u201cremains as vital today as when Pauahi wrote her will\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cOur mission is simple, yet powerful: to fulfill [Pauahi\u2019s] vision of empowering Native Hawaiians in perpetuity by improving the wellbeing of our people through education,\u201d she told a crowd of hundreds of alumni and supporters. \u201cThis is our focus, and our purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n I think they\u2019re targeting the Kamehameha schools because they are a very uniquely situated school \u2026much like the way they chose Harvard very specificallyEujin Park<\/p>\n Rose was one of the lawyers who successfully defended the admissions program in a 2003 challenge. At the time, the court ruled Kamehameha schools\u2019 race-conscious admissions policy served \u201ca legitimate remedial purpose\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the most meaningful moments of my career personally was defending our admissions policy two decades ago,\u201d Rose said during the event on Tuesday. \u201cWhen I took my oath as a trustee, I said, with every bone in my body, and every part of my soul, I made a promise. I promised to protect Pauahi\u2019s vision, to honor her name, to defend this incredible institution.\u201d<\/p>\n Things could be more difficult than they were 20 years ago, despite Kamehameha schools\u2019 public comments that it is ready for a long legal fight.<\/p>\n Osorio said times were different now with a ninth circuit court of appeals that is \u201cno longer what it used to be\u201d. He pointed to a panel of three judges on the circuit, who recently ruled 2-1 that Donald Trump can deploy the national guard to Portland.<\/p>\n He added the schools had been \u201cunder attack\u201d since the early 2000s by groups who \u201csuggest this resource and this institution was a racist institution since it had assessment for those of Hawaiian ancestry\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cNobody in Hawaii was ever fooled by that,\u201d he said. \u201cNo one here who understands this history ever really thought that the Hawaiian preference at Kamehameha schools was a racist preference. The vast majority of people here, including people who are not Hawaiian, saw this as the very, very least kind of resource that could be left in our hands.<\/p>\n \u201cTo Hawaiians, this challenge, I think it\u2019s the most important thing we\u2019ll ever be fighting,\u201d Osorio went on. \u201cAnd I think it\u2019s going to bring all of us \u2013 all of our vigor and all of our anger \u2013 together.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Advocates for a private school system established to educate Native Hawaiians say a new lawsuit targeting the admissions process is an ugly attempt to ignore the wishes of a Hawaiian princess who bequeathed her inheritance to secure a brighter future for her people nearly 140 years ago. The Kamehameha schools were established in the will<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30699,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[17981,17982,17980,764,364,4837,588,620,248],"class_list":{"0":"post-30698","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-bequeathed","9":"tag-hawaii","10":"tag-hawaiian","11":"tag-inheritance","12":"tag-people","13":"tag-princess","14":"tag-schools","15":"tag-set","16":"tag-sued"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}