Principal's Message
Aloha from Kohala Elementary School!
We are a rural school on the north end of the island of Hawai’i. Kohala Elementary School is the only public elementary school in Kohala and we work closely with our middle school and high school to ensure all students are successful at each phase of their educational journey.
Our school is a Title 1 school and we use those funds to strengthen learning in our core programs and to accelerate learning for students in need of support. Through our core reading program, Success for All, we are working to ensure all students are reading on grade level by grade three. The embedded cooperative learning strategies help to facilitate student discussion and increase student engagement in learning.
All West Hawaii schools have committed to a Guaranteed Viable Curriculum in math, identifying priority standards at each grade level. To teach these standards, we are working to improve instruction by incorporating effective teaching strategies. In school year 23-24, all teachers were training in Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics. Since then, we have enhanced our math instruction by incorporating more student discussion, collaboration and math modeling at both the concrete and picture levels.
To ensure our students have behaviors needed to be successful learners, we teach the COLTS path to success. These include C for Caring, O for On-Task, L for Leader, T for Thinker, and S for Self-Control. We've had much success and will continue to strengthen our efforts to develop our students in these areas.
Our Academic Plan includes student enrichment, therefore, our students have weekly resource classes which include Hawaiiana, computer, guidance, garden, P.E. and Health. We are also fortunate to have dedicated teachers passionate about developing student leadership. In addition to Student Council, we now have student Broadcast, yearbook, and student leadership.
We love this place where we live and our Alaka’i (student leaders) lead the entire student body in morning piko. Each morning, all students gather on the blacktop as Alaka’i blow the pu and leave them in song and chant to start the day.
We have an amazing school and work with our community and families to provide a quality education for our students!
