The state Department of Education is taking heat after the state Auditor revealed a classroom air conditioning project riddled with incompetence and mismanagement.
The Office of the Auditor published a report Tuesday about a pair of DOE projects to air condition Hawai‘i public school classrooms, after a 2016 announcement by then-Gov. David Ige that he would cool 1,000 classrooms by the end of that year.
In May 2016, DOE received $100 million for the Cool Classrooms Initiative, a project to install air conditioning units in classrooms throughout the state. But not even the state Auditor is sure about how that money was actually spent.
“We fully expected that the department would be able to verify what was spent, where it was spent, and what it was spent on,” the audit report reads. “DOE was unable to do so with complete confidence or certainty.”
Ultimately, the report was able to determine that the program spent about $122.8 million and cooled 838 classrooms. This led to an average of $125,253 per classroom.
About $25 million of the project funds were paid to seven design and project management firms, with another $78 million spent on construction.
The report describes a disorganized enterprise at the heart of DOE: missing or conflicting DOE documents, hasty retrofits of aging public school buildings, and money wasted on strategies that never panned out.
The vast majority of classrooms cooled were on O‘ahu, with more than $9 million spent on one school — Nānākuli High and Intermediate — to install 112 air conditioning systems in 63 classrooms. Several other schools, including Kahakai Elementary, the only Hawai‘i Island school included in the project, never saw their projects go to construction.
The decision for which schools got cooled supposedly came from an average temperature ranking of their geographic region, but the audit reported that many schools in the program were not highly ranked on that list, and that DOE officials could not explain how specific classrooms were selected.
To remove the need for electrical upgrades, DOE focused on solar-powered air conditioning, but the cost of solar panels limited the systems’ period of operation to merely five hours. And because many old classrooms still relied on jalousie windows, those windows had to be sealed with plexiglass — leading to classrooms with even poorer ventilation that couldn’t be air conditioned through all hours of the school day.
Even after successful installations, many of the solar systems and conditioning units failed or didn’t work properly, were installed poorly or were damaged, leading to estimated repair costs — again, undated and contradicting DOE documents made an accurate accounting impossible — between $3.3. million and $6 million.
While Ige and DOE declared that they had successfully cooled 1,000 classrooms in 2017, the general failure of the Cool Classrooms Initiative to actually cool classrooms led to a follow-up, the School Directed AC Program, in 2019.
This project was funded through remaining Cool Classrooms Initiative funds and would allow schools to request an electrical assessment to determine how many air conditioning systems the school’s electrical system could bear. Based on those assessments, schools would be authorized install air conditioners themselves.
The School Directed AC Program appears to have been even more haphazard than the Cool Classrooms Initiative, with next to no oversight or record keeping by the DOE. The Auditor was never able to obtain a DOE list of which schools participated in the program — as with many such inquiries, the report relied on records kept by contractors — and the department did not track how many air conditioners were installed through the program.
Ultimately, the audit described the program as an “afterthought” for DOE, and noted that, at the time of the investigation, it was unclear whether the program even still existed at all.
DOE Superintendent Keith Hayashi submitted a letter in response to the audit that noted that “virtually none” of the key managers involved are still with the program. The letter added that DOE began “protracted measures to enhance procedures for the School Directed AC Program” in 2024.
Hayashi issued a similar statement to Aloha State Daily Wednesday.
“The initiative was launched with urgency and good intentions — responding to real heat challenges affecting our students and staff — but was undermined by flawed execution, inconsistent oversight, and ineffective systems at the time,” read that statement. “Our priority now is to apply the lessons from this report. That includes improving internal accountability, ensuring proper planning for future projects, and delivering on our commitment to safe, comfortable learning environments for all students.
“We are taking meaningful steps to improve and rebuild confidence in how we serve our schools and communities,” Hayashi’s statement concluded.
The audit included a response to Hayashi’s letter, which the Auditor argued missed the point of the audit.
“Being able to account for use of public funds is quite simply a basic, fundamental responsibility of the (DOE),” the audit reads. “It is noteworthy that the Superintendent’s letter does not address how, going forward, (the DOE) will ensure it is accountable for its use of public funds.”
DOE did not respond to further questions from ASD, which included:
— Who was the administrator in charge of the design of the Cool Classrooms Initiative? Who took over the project after their resignation in 2017?
— Who was in charge of the School Directed AC Program?
— How often does DOE follow up with contractors for status reports?
— Has anything changed about the DOE’s record-keeping system since 2016?
— What “ineffective systems at the time” is Hayashi referring to?
— How was information about the School Directed AC Program conveyed to school administrators?
— What standards do DOE follow when selecting contractors?
— How many classrooms are currently considered unacceptably hot?
