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The Hawai'i State Department of Education is the most centralized and only statewide public education system in the United States . Established by Kamehameha III on October 15 , 1840 , it is the oldest school system west of the Mississippi River and only system established by a Sovereign Monarch . The Hawai'i State Department of Education oversees all 283 public schools and charter schools and over 13,000 teachers in the State Of Hawai'i . It serves an average of 182,798 students annually. STRUCTURE There are seven individual school districts that are directly controlled from or the Neighbor Islands to staggered four-year terms. The remaining member is a public high school student selected by the Hawai‘i State Student Council who serves as a non-voting member. The Board of Education is empowered by the State Constitution (Article X, Section 3 {Link without Title} ) to formulate statewide education policy. The Board also has the power to appoint the Superintendent of Education as the chief executive officer of the system. The Superintendent reports to and can be terminated by the Board. RELEVANT DEBATES Probably the most current and controversial debate over Hawai‘i school reform has to do with the structure of the State Department of Education: specifically, whether it should remain centralized or be broken into smaller districts. The main rationale usually given for the current centralized model is equity in distribution of resources: all schools are theoretically funded from the same pool of money on an equitable basis. (Most schools on the U.S. Mainland are organized into school districts funded from local property taxes; thus more affluent school districts theoretically receive more money and resources than less affluent areas.) Supporters of decentralization see it as a means of moving decision-making closer to the classroom, and thus achieving better student performance. The debate divides roughly along party lines, with Republican s generally supporting decentralization and the Democrat s supporting the centralized status quo. In 2002 , Republican Governor Linda Lingle ran on a campaign to reorganize the Hawai'i State Department of Education into smaller school districts that were localed modeled after a system found in Canada . The Democrat-controlled Hawai'i State Legislature, however, voted not to enact this plan in 2003 and 2004 . In January 2004 , Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich wanted to create a system similar to that of Hawai'i in his state but met fierce opposition from local school boards who did not want to lose control. Michigan also has discussed unifying their school districts and faced similar opposition. NETWORK SETUP The Hawai'i Department of Education provides a shared Sprint OC3 (via cable modem) internet connection for certain schools on the island of Oahu. Each school is dependant upon the NSSB (Network Services and Support Branch) for general layout and design. Schools are required to maintain and operate any hardware or software not essential to the overall network. School computers are commonly assigned DHCP IP addresses in the ranges of 172.17.224.1 to 172.17.227.255. Static addresses for network hardware, printers, and servers are in the range 165.248.77.1 to 165.248.247.255. Rumors speculate that the HIDOE has exhausted its pool of addresses, according to the NSSB this statement is false. Recently, the company Websense has been hired to manage content-filtering of internet traffic. Although highly ineffective, the filter is able to block more common websites. Methods to bypass the content filters are widely available and effective for most purposes. Since the installation (and recent renovation) of the Websense service, school internet traffic may experience a delay of up to 25 seconds. Most internet-enabled devices on the school networks are outdated mostly due to lack of funding and the HI-DOE's usage of legacy software such as MacSchool which requires the school's faculty to use the outdated Apple OS/9. Notable improvments are found in the occasional use of technologies such as fibre-optics and mysterious IPS "Tipping Point Systems". SCHOOL LUNCH(ES) Standard lunch fare is an offering of either the "Main" lunch, or a "Wiki" lunch as an alternate. Most schools have recently begun to use the new federal lunch-purchase system. The new computerized system is called "MealTime" and uses student ID's to determine the amount of "lunch-credits" a particular student has. HIGH SCHOOLS
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