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.

Time Line

September 1913: Maui High and Grammar School opens at Hamakuapoko with sixty-one students, sixteen of them in two high school classes.

June 1916: First five students graduate.

June 1919: French teacher Cecyl Holliday composes Maui High’s alma mater.

December 1921: Administration building designed by noted Hawai‘i architect C. W. Dickey is built with $66,000 appropriation from the Territorial Legislature.

1922: Maui High’s varsity football team sails to Hilo to play first off-island game.

1926: Grammar school classes move to Spreckelsville as Maui Standard School, later known as Kaunoa School.

1931: An occupational survey of the 447 students who graduated from 1918 to 1930 shows “there are no chronic loafers among the graduates,” The Maui News reports.
 
1932: First Asian staff member, 1925 Maui High graduate Hisao Nakamura, puts his prize-winning typing skills to work as school secretary.

1932–1933: After years of steady growth, enrollment slips as the Great Depression makes cash hard to come by, and the Territory requires high school students to pay $10 tuition per year.

1934–1935: New Deal programs pay students for part-time work and provide for the installation of a tennis court, sidewalks and athletic field.

1935: The opening of the Haleakala summit road inspires student art and poetry and is the theme of the 1935 Malu Nani yearbook.

1937: The yearbook name is changed to The Silversword and the Blue and White athletic teams become known as the Sabers.

1941–1942: Enrollment drops from more than 1,000 to 855 after the opening of Baldwin High School (1939) and St. Anthony High School (1940).

1941: Maui High students and the rest of Hawai‘i find their world changing drastically after the December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor.

1942: Students return from a long hiatus after Pearl Harbor to dig air-raid trenches, form a fire brigade, cope with shortages and do their bit to fill in for adult workers who have gone off to war. During this extraordinary time, youngsters continue to study hard while working in fields or offices, selling war bonds and doing volunteer work for the Red Cross and USO to help with the war effort.

1945: Back to a normal five-day school schedule with the war’s end, students fill in wartime air-raid ditches and wear threadbare P.E. and sports uniforms while postwar materials shortages continue.

1947–1948: Boys from the agriculture and shop classes disassemble Quonset huts from the former Marine base at Camp Maui and reassemble them on campus for classroom and locker-room use.

1950–1951: The transition of population from plantation camps to Kahului begins with the building of the first houses in Kahului and the Kahului Shopping Center. By 1953, only 770 students enroll at Maui High.

1952–1953: Three new wings built on the Hamakuapoko side of the main building provide space for science, business education and homemaking classes.

1955–1956: Maui High School’s football team takes first place for the first time since the founding of the Maui Interscholastic League.
 
1957: Mechanization makes the sugar industry less reliant on human labor, and the economy is in the doldrums. A survey finds only 13 of 166 Maui High School seniors plan to remain on Maui following graduation.

 1957–1958: The radio production class presents a weekly fifteen-minute program over KMVI, featuring commentary on campus news, talented students and personalities.

1958–1959: Enrollment is 700. The new concrete block cafeteria is built. Students celebrate Hawai‘i statehood.

1963: A full 10,000 students have attended the school since its establishment fifty years earlier. Students invite alumni to join in activities celebrating the anniversary.

1965: Patsy Takemoto Mink, elected to the U.S. Congress in 1964, is commencement speaker, urging grads to choose careers that contribute to bettering the lives of others.

1967: The student body of 632 is expected to drop to 500, far below the 1,000 minimum necessary for a comprehensive high school curriculum, and the school’s facilities need some $1.5 million in upgrades. Planning is underway to move the school to Kahului.

December 1971: Faculty and students help pack for the move that takes place during Christmas vacation.

January 1972: The new Maui High School opens on a barren eighty-acre campus at the edge of Kahului. The rural green Hamakuapoko campus will sit nearly deserted for thirty years, until the Friends of Old Maui High School set out to renovate the school and open it for new uses.