Old School Spirit

More than three decades after being abandoned to the elements, vandals and arson, Maui’s first public high school is kindling a passion for renewal.

 In 2006, as the Friends prepared to welcome reunion attendees to the newly spruced-up campus, Barbara Long asked me to help write a book that would tell the story of old Maui High. The months I spent reading yearbooks and listening to alumni made it clear why the school’s many graduates treasure the memories of their years there, and why Maui—and in fact the whole nation—owes a debt of gratitude to this country school.
   
Of all the distinguished students of Maui High School, Patsy Takemoto Mink is the best known. Student body president in 1943–1944 and class valedictorian, this Hamakuapoko girl excelled throughout high school, finding a haven there from the war years’ prejudice against Japanese Americans and the customary second-class status accorded to females.
   
Things were different in the outside world. Mink applied to many medical schools only to be turned down, switched to law and found, after earning her degree, that no Honolulu law firm would hire a woman. So Mink began her own practice. She joined in the Democratic revolution of the 1950s that eventually made her the first Japanese-American woman elected to the Territorial House of Representatives and the first nonwhite woman elected to the U.S. Congress. There she became principal author of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, now known as the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act, landmark federal legislation that ensured equal educational opportunities for girls and women. One result was to require the ratio of spending on athletic and educational programs to be proportionate to enrollment. Title IX would revolutionize women’s sports.
   
Mink’s high ideals and support for women, poor people and others who might not have a voice led the Friends of Old Maui High School to choose her name for the new incarnation of the school where she had learned so much. An Environmental Protection Agency grant and lots of volunteer work launched efforts to create the Patsy T. Mink Center, opening the campus once more to productive use. The Friends hired planners Chris Hart & Partners to help come up with ideas to advance the legacy of old Maui High School and the ideals of Patsy Mink.
   
Not long after the reunion, the campus was quiet again on a Saturday morning when members of the Friends gathered in the cafeteria to hear what the planners had put together. That ambitious plan envisions a place where children and adults can come for retreats and education, a model of environmental sustainability and “green” architecture that takes full advantage of the natural setting and remaining buildings of the campus. Many steps remain before the old school where a thousand teenagers once learned and played can flourish again. But it’s a journey that will be powered by the spirit still strong in the many hearts that love the graceful arches of old Maui High School.