Have you seen this?
http://www.kycbs.net/Bishop3.htm
Fourth or fifth item down
Xxxxxxx
July 16, 2003
How Kamehameha
Admitted A Haole
By Bob Jones, Midweek Magazine
You thought the 1997 “Broken Trust” essay and subsequent ouster of all the Bishop Estate trustees except Oswald Stender ended the internal fighting at Kamehameha Schools?
Not by a long shot. It’s back, just as bitter and the newest trustees have stepped into a legal minefield that could take their legs off and alter the school forever. They’ve in effect invited a federal lawsuit and might cause the somnambular Probate Court and Special Master to wake up and notice that something’s very wrong. And then there’s the Internal Revenue Service.
And when some activist members of the Kamehameha Schools family get to the end of this column they should be pounding on trustees’ doors and demanding explanations.
School spokesman Kekoa Paulson says “Kamehameha Schools’ admissions policy and procedures were followed throughout the 2002 process. Both the attorney general’s office and the court appointed master have been briefed on the questions that have been raised about the situation in Maui last year, and neither of them have voiced concern over how the policy had been applied.”
I wonder if they had these facts.
My story goes back to November of 2001 and April-May of 2002 when K.S. candidates for admission were being screened and interviewed and selected. That was an unusual time of low applications for the new Maui campus and, so, low openings —— the latter set by the school based on the expectation of how many would apply.
According to well-sourced information, notes and personal recollections I gathered last week, the trustees and some administration officials at the schools manipulated the vacancies in 8th grade in order to admit the first non-Hawaiian student since some haole-faculty kids were let in more than 40 years ago. Then the trustees decided to keep silent about that shattering decision and did —— until there was a news leak from Maui campus officials in July 2002.
Faced with a Hawaiian community uproar, the trustees met in an emergency session with advisory board members and decided to say they had only admitted non-Hawaiian Kalani Rossel because there were no more qualified Hawaiians. Material and personal recollections I gathered show that was an untrue statement. There were two qualified Hawaiian girls on the list of qualified applicants, vying for one remaining 8th-grade vacancy that April.
But the vacancy was on the boys’ side. The school does split the vacancies by gender but does not require total gender equity. So the one boys’-side vacancy was awarded to one of the Hawaiian girls. That left the preference-qualified girl and non-preference-qualified Rossel unaccepted. Both had exceeded the test-score cut-off.
That should have been the end of it under KS policy in effect in 2002; sorry, but our admissions are now closed. That no-fudging policy had been adopted to end the old days when “red dots” put by certain applicants’ names meant they were friends of friends of the old trustees and that room should be created for them. The Probate Court had ordered fair, transparent admissions implemented by school officials, not the trustees.
In apparent disregard of that mandate, the meeting’s notes show, the trustees with the blessing of then chief legal officer Colleen Wong (now the schools’ interim chief executive officer) created two new vacancies and admitted the other Hawaiian girl and the non-Hawaiian Rossel.
Then after fixing the process in order to admit him, they agreed to say nothing publicly about Rossel, whose parents say they marked right on the initial application that he was not Hawaiian. The trustees claim they had planned to make an announcement of admitting the first non-Hawaiian later in the year. A source in the admissions process tells me that despite my doubts, that’s true. They wanted to wait until Rossel was in, it was an irreversible, done deal, and then they’d take the heat but could say there’s was nothing they could do about it. They’d also keep claiming it was only because of no qualified Hawaiian applicants and hope the community bitching would go away.
According to material provided, an internal audit confirmed that trustees previously deviated from Hawaiian preference during admissions with a non-Hawaiian student who subsequently withdrew before the school year began. It was the first effort to slip in a non-Hawaiian. Everyone kept quiet on that, too, and it didn’t cause a problem because of the student’s eventual withdrawal.
It’s rather amazing that the trustees could ever have thought such an explosive decision as the Rossel case could be kept secret. Did they think that since this new student’s first name was Kalani nobody would question his ethnicity and it would be a non-issue? Surely they knew there was high risk of a leak.
But why would the trustees do anything so stupidly risky and guaranteed to make many Hawaiians go ballistic without some advance discussion and community preparation?
The trustees have tended to play a very cagey game of balancing between the Princess Pauahi Bishop’s will (as interpreted by her haole husband after her death to favor Hawaiian-blood children) and the lurking problem of a federal-tax-exempt trust potentially being cited as racist. They said after this started blowing up last year that “we feel we could not change the admissions policy from one of preference to one of exclusion. We must stand by the decision, despite the pain it has caused. We do regret the way the decision was communicated, and we have apologized for that. The process of evaluating individual applicants is confidential and must be kept private in order to protect the integrity of the trust and the privacy of applicants.”
The more likely answer is that the trustees feared a lawsuit by the Rossel family if their son was excluded in a year of very few qualified-by-test-scores Hawaiian applicants. They wanted to dodge a legal bullet and did not want to make an announcement that would arouse the wrath of many Hawaiians who feel the school should stay Hawaiian.
The operational culture established by the Probate Court after the scandal of the ‘97 shake-up of trustees says that admissions were to be controlled by the new CEO, Hamilton McCubbin, and chief admissions officer Wayne Chang. But those two were overruled by the trustees and legal officer Wong....
Now here’s the corker. Up through the Rossel affair, K.S. admissions used the term qualified Hawaiians. That meant cut-off test scores. But that also lowered the number of OK applicants and opened the way for non-Hawaiians to get in if Hawaiian applications were very low. So the trustees changed the rules for school year 2003. No more test scores. Just a preference for anyone with any amount of Hawaiian blood.
The current website says “Hawaiian preference so far as permitted by law.” Ironically, that no-more-test-standards decision has really complicated things for the Hawaiians-only crowd.
Here’s why:
A lawsuit was filed last month in Hawaii federal court on behalf of an unnamed non-Hawaiian student who says that his civil rights were violated when the school denied him admission for this school year due to race. The attorneys are Sacramento, Calif., constitutional law expert Eric Grant, and local lawyer John Goemans, who successfully challenged the Hawaiian-only voting for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs elections three years ago in the Rice vs. Cayetano case. They will argue that if there are no test-score or other standards for admission, other than having some drops of Hawaiian blood, isn’t that illegal racial exclusion?
Many law experts say you can’t be “legal” with the IRS tax-exemptions code if you admit strictly on the basis of race, which K.S. now does. That word “preference” is unlikely to save it. It would fly in the face of the latest Supreme Court decision on affirmative action and many other, older federal court decisions. The trustees have been painfully aware of this conundrum and even stopped taking ROTC money so they could say they don’t get federal money.
Grant and Goemans will argue that a tax exemption is federal money.
New shenanigans like those that brought in the IRS in ‘97 over trustees’ bloated salaries could mean the end of Kamehameha Schools’ special tax status. When the feds stomped down on Bob Jones University for religious exclusion, the school had to pony up six years’ worth of back taxes. It’s been estimated that Kamehameha Schools could be assessed a billion dollars if it were to be found in past and current violation of its tax-exempt status.
Four of the trustees involved in that contentious Maui admission decision last year—— chair Constance Lau, vice-chair Nainoa Thompson, Douglas Ing and Robert Kihune —— are said to favor Hawaiian-only admissions. Only the fifth trustee, Diane Plotts, has been mentioned in news stories as amenable to opening the schools to everyone. My sources say she has voiced that opinion privately as well.
On top of these calamitous problems, Kamehameha Schools has the issue of the forced departure and golden parachute severance for ousted CEO Hamilton McCubbin over an alleged improper relationship with his secretary. He has denied that it was a sexual affair. McCubbin is married and also was alleged to have had an improper relationship with a woman when he was at the University of Wisconsin. He is suing the UW in federal court for defamation over that.
If you believe McCubbin’s position that he’s simply the victim of the jealousy of two former secretaries who were demoted in favor of the woman in question, then the trustees’ decision to use that matter to force him out could have been the culmination of something much bigger —— McCubbin’s strained relations with a board of heavyweights not content to let a newly-named CEO run everything he wanted to run. I emphasize could have been.
It’s been no campus secret that current trustee Douglas Ing and former trustee Oswald Stender thought the better-politically-connected Michael Chun should have been given the top job. Chun was demoted and subordinated to McCubbin by McCubbin when he was hired away from the University of Wisconsin to run what used to be called Bishop Estate and is now just Kamehameha Schools, with about a $6-billion corpus and ties to nearly every career politician in Hawaii.
Most of its cash is at First Hawaiian Bank, with smaller amounts at other institutions, but not American Savings Bank because trustee Connie Lau also sits on the board of directors of HEI Inc., that bank’s parent company. The competition for that money is not insignificant in a time of extremely low-interest-payout and big demand for new mortgages.
There have been complaints at K.S. that McCubbin was too publicity hungry or too egotistic. On the other hand, trustees traditionally have been campus butt-inskies and never more so than in the late ‘90s when Lokelani Lindsey instituted personal micro-management. (Lindsey has been convicted in a money-laundering case and is scheduled to start serving prison time in August.)
It’s gotten so petty and personal at K.S. that the trustees had the latest Ke Alii Pauahi Foundation annual report re-printed at substantial cost (some say $50,000) in order to erase McCubbin’s name and picture, even though he was the CEO and also president of the foundation for the period covered by the report and was the one who approved the report before the alterations....
I like the observation of a sympathetic, long-time KS faculty member, now retired: “The problem up there is that everything they do is done to excess.”
I don’t know how much more of this the school can stand and still fully function.
Says a well-known alumnus involved in spreading word to Hawaiians of this current dispute: “The previous board was accused of a quid pro quo style. Are we witnessing an emergence of the same mind set, along with a penchant for micro-management and an organizational culture focused on personalities, with power rather than service the dominant concern and with personal integrity cast aside?”
The lackadaisical Probate Court needs to examine who is actually running admissions, the CEO as directed by that court and the IRS or the trustees? The state attorney general needs to get cracking on potential fiduciary violations if it can be shown that the trustees lied in the Rossel case, and the IRS needs to consider pulling the tax-exemption because of too many violations of the spirit of federal law on racial exclusions.
The trustees need to come clean to the Hawaiian community.
Hamilton McCubbin and former admissions chief Wayne Chang and former legal officer Colleen Wong should be subpoenaed by somebody to testify with immunity about the admissions blunder and the tug-of-war over who runs the school.
End the feints and deceits.
Some candor, please, for a change.
– E-mail Bob Jones at BanyanHouse@hula.net
www.midweek.com/extra2/extra2
May 5, 2003
McCubbin out as CEO of Kamehameha trust
By Dan Nakaso, Honolulu Advertiser
Hamilton McCubbin, who brought stability to the Kamehameha Schools after years of scandal and controversy, announced his resignation today as the trust’s first chief executive officer.
from the article:
“...My story goes back to November of 2001 and April-May of 2002 when K.S. candidates for admission were being screened and interviewed and selected. That was an unusual time of low applications for the new Maui campus and, so, low openings —— the latter set by the school based on the expectation of how many would apply.
According to well-sourced information, notes and personal recollections I gathered last week, the trustees and some administration officials at the schools manipulated the vacancies in 8th grade in order to admit the first non-Hawaiian student since some haole-faculty kids were let in more than 40 years ago. Then the trustees decided to keep silent about that shattering decision and did —— until there was a news leak from Maui campus officials in July 2002. ....”
Questions:
Who specifically let these kids in more than 40 years ago?
What did they do to get the kids in?
Where (other states/countries) did the kids come from?
When exactly did the admissions occur?
Why did they let the kids in?
How long did this go on; did they do this more often than “more than 40 years ago?
My daughter-in-law attended Kamehameha in Honolulu.
Beautiful school.
.
More questions:
“....That should have been the end of it under KS policy in effect in 2002; sorry, but our admissions are now closed. That no-fudging policy had been adopted to end the old days when “red dots” put by certain applicants’ names meant they were friends of friends of the old trustees and that room should be created for them. The Probate Court had ordered fair, transparent admissions implemented by school officials, not the trustees. ….”
Who got admitted with ‘red dot’ system?
What was done to create ‘room’?
Where (state, etc) were they from?
When exactly did they get in?
Why did trustees and not officials manage admissions?
yet more questions:
“...The operational culture established by the Probate Court after the scandal of the ‘97 shake-up of trustees says that admissions were to be controlled by the new CEO, Hamilton McCubbin, and chief admissions officer Wayne Chang. But those two were overruled by the trustees and legal officer Wong....
Now here’s the corker. Up through the Rossel affair, K.S. admissions used the term qualified Hawaiians. That meant cut-off test scores. But that also lowered the number of OK applicants and opened the way for non-Hawaiians to get in if Hawaiian applications were very low. So the trustees changed the rules for school year 2003. No more test scores. Just a preference for anyone with any amount of Hawaiian blood.
The current website says “Hawaiian preference so far as permitted by law.” Ironically, that no-more-test-standards decision has really complicated things for the Hawaiians-only crowd. ...”
Lawsuits
Who exactly was sued? School officials? Trustees? Both?
What was the outcome of the lawsuits?
Where are the people involved in the lawsuits now? Jail? Free?
When were the lawsuits settled?
Admissions change
Why did Wong override the probate court decision?
What happened afterward? Another lawsuit?
Why change from test score method to heritage method for admission criteria?
Even MORE questions; follow-the-money:
“....Most of its cash is at First Hawaiian Bank, with smaller amounts at other institutions, but not American Savings Bank because trustee Connie Lau also sits on the board of directors of HEI Inc., that bank’s parent company. The competition for that money is not insignificant in a time of extremely low-interest-payout and big demand for new mortgages. ...”
Cash location/what bank
Who else was a trustee and on a board of directors of a parent company, and thus excluded?
What/Where other banks besides First Hawaiian had the cash?
Why was most of the cash at one bank?
When were there any cases where a trustee was also on a bank board of directors?
Carol Katsuyo Makahanaloa, 72, of Kapolei, a Bank of Hawaii loan officer, died in Honolulu. She was born in Honolulu. She is survived by husband Joseph, sons Ainsley K. and Samuel, daughters Kara Kaneshiro and Betsy L. Bush, brother Dr. Hamilton McCubbin , sister Joni Fabrao, 11 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2005/Jun/30/ln/ln50pobituaries.html
JONETTE “JONI” SACHIYO MCCUBBIN FABRAO, 65, of Hawai’i Kai, died June 13, 2005. Born in Honolulu. Employed at the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands. Survived by husband, Raymond; children, Chandra Satele Jr., Raymond, Raechelle and Kimberley Fabrao; sister, Carol Makahanaloa; brother, Hamilton McCubbin; nine grandchildren.
+++++++++++++++++++++
Native Hawaiians with a blood quantum level of 50 percent or higher can qualify for the lands, which come with a 99 year lease at a cost of $1 per year.
The ruling does not indicate whether the state must allocate funds from this year's budget for the department's administrative expenses.
DHHL’s budget in fiscal year 2012 was $185 million, 85 percent of which comes from trust funds. The rest is from federal and special funds.
EXCLUSIVE: Hawaiian Home Lands owed $82 million in outstanding loans
Posted: Apr 12, 2013
Star Advertiser 3-Part Expose on the Department of Hawaiian Homelands
MAY 8, 2013