Sarah Osofsky returned to school last year to earn her master’s degree in social work, hoping to give back to her community and find a job that would pay enough to survive Hawaiʻi’s high cost of living.

Now, less than two weeks away from graduation, the mother of two is struggling to find a position that can sustain her family.

Most social work jobs she’s seen in recent months offer salaries of $60,000 or less — enough to disqualify her from safety net programs like food stamps, but not enough to comfortably provide for her kids. She’s considered moving back to California where she has family who could support her, but she wants to stay in Hawaiʻi so her children can be near their dad.

“What I’m balancing right now is, do I take a low, low paying job that then I’ll qualify for services like food stamps and Medicaid,” Osofsky said, “or do I hold out and try to find those few and far between really good jobs that will make enough so I don’t qualify but I don’t need it.”

Osofsky’s struggle is a familiar one for working families in Hawaiʻi. In 2024, nearly 30% of Hawaiʻi households were living paycheck-to-paycheck and struggling to afford basic necessities like housing, child care and food, according to an annual count of the state’s ALICE families — an acronym for people who are asset limited, income constrained, and employed.

Like Osofsky, roughly 40% of these families considered leaving the state over the past year, according to a study from Aloha United Way.

While some reports indicate that more locals have been returning to Hawaiʻi in the last few years, the state’s high cost of living continues to drive some families away, straining the public education system and economy.

Earlier this year, the Department of Education said its kindergarten enrollment dropped from 13,000 in 2019 to nearly 10,800 this year, citing estimates that 20% of people leaving Hawaiʻi are school-aged kids. The department is now starting the process of consolidating small schools, although it hasn’t yet identified which campuses are at risk of closure.

A few years ago, state lawmakers grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic proposed a bold slate of reforms to improve the plight of working families: free school meals for all, universal access to preschool and paid family leave. But the state’s big plans for progress have resulted in incremental steps, and some families and advocates say change isn’t happening quickly enough.

Lawmakers this session created a working group to study paid family leave but failed to turn the yearslong proposal into law. The state expanded eligibility for preschool tuition subsidies and funded preschool construction but failed to address the ongoing shortage of early learning educators. And Senate Bill 1300 — considered one of the biggest wins for students this year — expanded access to free school meals but stopped short of providing them for all kids.

At the same time, uncertainty looms around the future of programs that rely on federal dollars to support working families, including school meals and early learning centers.

Amid the upheaval, state lawmakers were hesitant to pass big spending measures this year, opting instead to set aside $200 million to help Hawaiʻi prepare for federal funding cuts. But some advocates say now is exactly the time for the state to make a bigger investment in families.

“The state Legislature, and frankly, the counties, should be thinking, ‘Bad stuff is coming,’” said Deborah Zysman, executive director of Hawaiʻi Children’s Action Network. “We don’t quite know what yet, but we should be thinking about how to take care of our own people.”

An Urgent Need For Child Care

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Osofsky worried about the social development of her son, who was just turning 2 when lockdown restrictions began. But when he began attending the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa Children’s Center later that year, Osofsky said, he received services for his speech delay and became comfortable making friends and recognizing letters.

But paying for preschool was a challenge, Osofsky said. The Preschool Open Doors program provides a state subsidy to help cover tuition, but her son was ineligible when he started because the program only covered 4-year-olds at the time. The program expanded to include 3-year-olds last year.

Hawaiʻi has pledged to offer preschool to all 3- and 4-year-olds by 2032. The Ready Keiki initiative, led by Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke, currently estimates the state needs to add more than 330 classrooms in the next seven years to provide preschool to an additional 6,700 children.

While lawmakers successfully expanded access to tuition subsidies and funded more preschool construction this year, progress toward the state’s ambitious goal has slowed on other fronts.

One successful bill this session expands eligibility for preschool subsidies by including 2-year-olds and repealing the requirement that families must use the subsidy at a nationally accredited provider, which has created financial and administrative barriers for smaller programs in the past, Zysman said.

But the Department of Human Services is on track to spend only $20 million of its $50 million budget for preschool subsidies this year, said Scott Morishige, administrator of the department’s Benefit, Employment and Support Services Division.

To ramp up its spending, DHS is considering expanding the income eligibility to 500% of the federal poverty line. If DHS adopts the rules this summer, Morishige said, a family of four could make up to $184,000 annually and still be eligible for assistance, compared to the past income limit of $110,000.

The state budget sets aside $20 million to build more public preschool classrooms over the next three years. The state plans on opening 25 public preschool classrooms this fall and an additional 25 classrooms the following year, far less than previous estimates that Hawaiʻi could build 40-50 classrooms annually.

While the state would like to take a more aggressive approach to opening public preschool classrooms moving forward, Luke said, the Ready Keiki initiative is also relying on private providers and charter schools to help expand access. The state is starting larger construction projects, like standalone preschool centers, that could add seats more rapidly as they open in the next few years.

“There is an urgency for us to open as many preschool seats as we can,” she said.

But families’ demand for preschool could grow beyond what the state has anticipated if the federal government stops funding its own child care programs. Head Start, which relies on federal funding and serves roughly 2,800 children and pregnant mothers, is currently Hawaiʻi’s largest provider of early learning services, said Ryan Kusumoto, president and CEO of the nonprofit Parents And Children Together.

The Trump administration has previously threatened to cut funding entirely for Head Start, although the most recent version of the federal budget keeps program funding intact. Some Hawaiʻi Head Start programs are still waiting to receive confirmation for next year’s funding, and the recent closure of some regional offices could create backlogs in awarding this money, said Ben Naki, president of the Head Start Association of Hawaiʻi.

“There’s no existing infrastructure that can pick up those 2,800 kids,” Kusumoto said. “And we’re talking about kids who don’t have any other resources.”

First Steps For Free Meals

Since September, Christine Russo said paying for meals has become a greater challenge for her family as her twins joined her 10-year-old in attending school every day. She sets aside roughly $180 each month so her kids can purchase breakfast and lunch at school — a challenge for the public school teacher, whose husband is a retail store manager.

Russo’s kids don’t qualify for free or reduced-price school meals, but she said her family could still benefit from the ongoing push to bring back a pandemic-era program that made meals free for all students.

Lawmakers stopped short of funding a universal free meals program this year but took incremental steps by passing Senate Bill 1300. Starting next year, the state will provide free school meals to students who currently qualify for reduced-price lunch. The following year, eligibility for free school meals would be expanded to families making up to 300% of the federal poverty level, or roughly $110,000 for a family of four.

The bill appropriates $565,000 to provide more free school meals next year and an additional $3.4 million for the program’s expansion the following year. More than 68,000 students in the Department of Education qualified for free meals this year, and 10,000 qualified for reduced-price meals.

The bill also requires schools feed students who don’t have enough money to purchase lunch or already have meal debt. Students have accrued more than $105,000 in meal debt this school year, DOE communications director Nanea Ching said.

At Castle High School, junior Tayli Kahoopii said she receives free meals, but some of her friends don’t qualify. When someone doesn’t have enough money in their account to purchase lunch, the register makes a buzzing sound — loud enough to embarrass students and, in one instance, deter Kahoopii’s friend from trying to purchase meals for a week.

“On a daily basis, you see kids getting their food taken away, and there’s really nothing that they can do about it,” Kahoopii said, adding that it’s difficult for students to learn and focus when they don’t have access to food during the school day.

Rep. Scot Matayoshi, who has introduced bills for the past three years proposing free school meals, said SB1300 is an important step. But he still plans on advocating for universal free school meals in the coming years, especially since it would reduce the administrative barriers schools and families face in determining who qualifies for free meals.

Daniela Spoto, director of food equity at Hawaiʻi Appleseed, said providing all students with free school meals could also become more important with federal funding on the line. Proposed federal cuts to a program allowing schools in low-income areas to provide free meals to all children could impact 52 schools and more than 27,000 kids in Hawaiʻi, according to estimates from the Food Research and Action Center.

“It should be a staple for our schools to have free school lunch,” said Castle junior Haliʻa Tom-Jardine, who will begin qualifying for free school meals next year. “It should be a right.”

‘Bad Things Are Coming’

During the pandemic, people saw lawmakers step up and meet the needs of working families through federal initiatives like the child tax credit and free school meals, said Kayla Keehu-Alexander, vice president of community impact at Aloha United Way. Now, she said, state lawmakers need to do the same during times of uncertainty.

“If we don’t start making some big policy changes around the cost of living, around housing, we could potentially be looking at a larger out-migration than we’ve had in the past,” she said.

Hawaiʻi is already starting to see the possible impacts of out-migration on its schools and economy. While some people are coming back to Hawaiʻi to raise families, Keehu-Alexander said, it’s unclear if they’re joining the workforce in areas with the worst staffing shortages, like education or healthcare.

Looking ahead to next year, Zysman said she would like to see a successful bill establishing paid family leave in Hawaiʻi, which would provide caregivers paid time off to care for their loved ones. Lawmakers have failed to pass a bill for several years, although they did approve a resolution last month establishing a working group that will study how to implement paid family leave over the next year.

Zysman added that she’s concerned about the long-term impacts of the historic tax cut lawmakers passed last year. While she supports cuts that can make it more affordable for people to stay in Hawaiʻi, she said, she’s worried that tax breaks for the wealthiest will make it harder for the state to fund programs that can keep working families afloat.

“In my gut, I feel like bad things are coming,” Zysman said, “and we should have acted more preemptively.”

This was originally published on . Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

Mai Hall expected that her oldest child would automatically receive special education services for her autism, dyslexia and ADHD when she enrolled in a Kaimukī elementary school 10 years ago. But the school said Hall’s daughter didn’t need any additional support, insisting that she earned good grades and got along with her friends. 

It was only after Hall received training from a federally funded parent information center that she was able to successfully advocate for her daughter — and later, her son — to get the support services they needed.

Parents of students with disabilities have long struggled to ensure their kids have the resources and support they need in public schools in Hawaiʻi, which ranks among the worst states in the nation when it comes to academic outcomes for special education students.

Today, Hall’s daughter is attending college and her son is receiving the accommodations he needs to feel supported and happy at school. But Hall and other families are worried that potential cuts to federal funding and efforts to shutter the U.S. Department of Education will result in fewer services and learning opportunities for special education students.   

“We really don’t need to worry about our children’s education any more than we already are,” Hall said. 

Education advocates and families say federal funding and regulation have played a key role in strengthening protections for special education students in Hawaiʻi, but it’s unclear what oversight will look like moving forward. President Donald Trump cut the U.S. DOE’s staff by nearly half last month, resulting in the closure of seven civil rights offices dedicated to processing student discrimination claims, including those related to disabilities.

A  from the administration also aims to dismantle the U.S. DOE, and the administration has proposed shifting special education programs to the Department of Health and Human Services. But the health department doesn’t have the staff or expertise to hold states accountable for following federal special education laws, said Meghan Burke, a professor at Vanderbilt University.    

A reduction in federal oversight may make it harder for Hawaiʻi families to receive support and resources for their children, said attorney Keith Peck, who leads the  providing legal representation to families seeking special education services. 

Federal funding is currently tied to Hawaiʻi’s compliance with special education laws, Peck said, but he’s worried the new administration may provide states with more flexibility and less accountability on how the money can be spent.   

“If the funding is no longer linked to allowing the parents to assert their rights and dispute against the Department of Education, if the (Hawaiʻi) DOE no longer has to comply with those protections, then nobody will have any protections,” Peck said. 

What’s At Stake? 

Hawaiʻi’s education department enrolls over 18,000 special education students and receives $50 million from the federal government each year to educate those children. To access the money,  Hawaiʻi must submit annual data reports and comply with federal laws requiring schools provide special education students with necessary services, from physical therapy to one-on-one aids. 

Teachers, families and educational specialists work together to determine the specific services students with disabilities should receive in schools. 

But Hawaiʻi has fallen short of meeting federal benchmarks for the quality of special education services for the last decade, according to  from the U.S. DOE. 

Hawaiʻi’s special education students rank among the lowest in the nation in reading and math proficiency and learn in traditional classroom settings at lower rates than their peers on the mainland. 

Researchers and families say  in general education classrooms provides them with important opportunities to interact with their peers and raise their academic achievement. 

Leah Yim said she’s lost count of the hundreds of meetings she’s attended over the years to advocate for her two children with special needs. 

Yim’s 6-year-old daughter currently receives speech therapy for her autism spectrum disorder, while her 15-year-old son has a nurse and aid accompanying him in class. He also receives services like physical and occupational therapy as part of his treatment after having a stroke in utero. 

Yim said she hasn’t heard of any changes to her children’s services so far, but worries that federal funding cuts could reduce the number of educators and specialists in schools, which already face a shortage of special education teachers. 

“My worry would just be the amount of caseloads that they’re carrying, and then how that would affect their quality of services one-on-one with our child,” said Yim, whose family also  against the state education department in 2023 accusing a teacher at Kaiser High School of sexually abusing their son. 

While the U.S. DOE plays a key role in protecting the rights of special education students, the agency has limited enforcement powers.

In the most extreme cases, the U.S. DOE can take away special education funding if states aren’t complying with federal law, said Nathan Stevenson, an associate professor at Kent State University. In most cases, he said, the federal government steps in with grants or training to support states in areas where they’re struggling. 

In Hawaiʻi, the federal government has provided a variety of aid, such as training sessions teaching staff how to resolve disputes with parents over special education services and collaborations with national centers to expand access to preschool for students with disabilities, said department spokesperson Krislyn Yano. The department declined an interview for this story. 

The U.S. DOE also has a regulatory branch, the Office of Civil Rights, dedicated to processing complaints from students who file claims of discrimination based on gender, race, age or disability against their schools. As of January 2025, Hawaiʻi had  in both public schools and universities, 17 of which had to do with students’ disabilities. 

JD Hsin, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama, said recent staffing cuts to OCR and the closure of seven regional offices will make it much harder for the remaining employees to handle families’ complaints and ensure states are providing special education students with the services they need. As of January 2025, OCR had over 12,000 pending cases that could take years to close and required in-depth investigations involving families, schools and federal attorneys.  

Now, with fewer staff on board, Hsin said, he’s worried that many cases will be left unresolved, leaving families with no answers about the support their children should receive in school. 

“Those are kids’ lives,” Hsin said. “These are just kids who want an education.” 

Reduced Oversight And Enforcement 

At the Hawaiʻi Disability Rights Center, Executive Director Louis Erteschik said he’s most concerned about what accountability will remain if the U.S. DOE is dismantled and special education is moved to the Department of Health and Human Services. Already, he said, many students with disabilities aren’t receiving the education they deserve under law. 

In 2019, Erteschik  with the Office of Civil Rights arguing that students with disabilities weren’t receiving adequate services because they were suspended at three times the rate of the rest of their peers. 

While Trump has proposed shifting special education oversight from the U.S. DOE to the Department of Health and Human Services, the move would require an act of Congress, said Jennifer Coco, interim executive director at The Center for Learner Equity. But there are ongoing worries that the federal government could reduce funding for students with disabilities, she said, adding that the U.S. DOE is already underfunding special education in schools and has consistently fallen short of its promise of covering 40% of the costs of providing services. 

Currently, the funding Hawaiʻi receives from the U.S. DOE makes up roughly 10% of what the state spends on special education. 

U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda said the state would have to fill in the funding gaps if the federal government reduces its support for special education. But, she said, the uncertainty around the future of federal funding makes it hard for state lawmakers to plan on how they’ll meet special education students’ needs.  

“I have great fears that we will go backwards in terms of actually providing the appropriate and adequate education to our special needs students,” Tokuda said.  

Federal funding for Hawaiʻi schools should remain roughly the same from this year to next year,  Superintendent Keith Hayashi is slated to give to the Board of Education on Thursday.

Peck at the Advocacy Project said he’s most concerned that the federal government won’t enforce the mandates that have historically accompanied its special education funding to states. With the administration’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. DOE, the federal government will lack the staff and expertise needed to oversee states’ compliance with special education law, he said. 

Hawaiʻi has a state equivalent of the federal special education law that also requires schools to meet the needs of students with disabilities, providing families with an extra layer of protection if the federal government stops enforcing its laws. But the state still needs an external source of enforcement to keep schools accountable, Peck said.    

It’s unlikely the Hawaiʻi education department will take on the added responsibility of strengthening oversight over its schools, Erteschik said, adding that states don’t have the same familiarity with special education law and requirements compared to the federal level. 

“The state can’t oversee itself by definition,” he said.

This story was originally posted on .

After landing a spot in a nationally-competitive fellowship program for high school students run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last summer, Keila Silva got to work investigating a local ice cream plant in Suffield.

The plant, operated by dairy company HP Hood, had over its handling of potentially-hazardous ammonia chemicals — just down the road from one of Suffield’s only federally-assisted housing developments.

Silva, a 17-year-old senior at Suffield High School, wanted to know what impact the plant was having on her community, so she spent this school year combing through a trove of online records dating back to the 1990s.

She was putting the final touches on a report summarizing her findings last month when she got an email from a fellowship supervisor inviting her to an “emergency” meeting on Feb. 18. The purpose of that meeting, Silva soon learned, was to discuss the Trump administration’s related to “diversity, equity and inclusion” — a term broadly used to describe policies aimed at combating discrimination and civil rights violations and promoting diversity.

The message of the meeting was blunt: The federal government would no longer be supporting the projects she and her peers had spent months working on.

“It was heartbreaking to hear,” Silva said in a recent interview. “I had a feeling that it was going to happen, and I had personally been preparing myself for that reality, only because just seeing the news, it seemed like it was going to be inevitable, and unfortunately that ended up being true.”

While much of the focus on President Donald Trump’s massive revamping of the federal government has been on its impact to thousands of government workers, Silva’s story and others show how even high school students are getting caught up in the tumult. Last week, WSHU reported that a New Haven charter school was from a “green jobs” workforce development program after its federal funding was cut off.

In a statement Friday, Conservation Law Foundation staff attorney Rachel Briggs condemned the administration’s treatment of young people working on federally-backed climate and environmental policy programs. (Briggs is one of several local environmental advocates who have signed a letter of support for Silva’s work.)

“President Trump is dismantling vital agencies like NOAA and the [Environmental Protection Agency], laying off dedicated public servants and eliminating opportunities for young people committed to making their neighborhoods safer and healthier,” Briggs said. “We should be encouraging these young people who are driven to make a difference in the world and ensure that every community has clean water to drink and clean air to breathe. They are a model for all of us, particularly for those in the highest levels of our federal government.”

The Young Changemakers Fellowship began in 2023 as a joint effort between NOAA and the North American Association for Environmental Education, “dedicated to collaborating with and empowering the next generation of ocean and environmental leaders,” according announcing the program’s continuation last year. The NAAEE, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., provided operational support for the program in cooperation with the federal agency.

Silva was part of the second cohort of fellows, which she said included students from ten other states, as well as Guam and American Samoa.

A notice now posted atop the states that fellowship will not run in the upcoming school year, but it doesn’t give an explanation.

The president’s , which preceded the fellowship’s discontinuation called on officials to “coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”

A spokesman for NOAA declined to comment on any changes made to the program as a result of Trump’s executive orders, citing a “long-standing practice” of not discussing internal personnel or management matters.

“NOAA remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience,” the spokesman, Scott Smullen, said in an email.

Stacie Pierpoint, a spokeswoman for NAAEE, said the decision to discontinue the program was made by federal authorities, and she declined to speculate on whether it might resume.

“We hope it comes back in the future,” Pierpoint said in an email. “We need more programs that build leadership and civic engagement skills and help protect people and the planet.”

Silva said she first became interested in environmental justice after participating in a for teenagers at the University of Connecticut during her sophomore year of high school. In that program, Silva said she used an EPA database to compare how people living in low-income and minority neighborhoods were being disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change.

“I have always been more of a social justice person” Silva said. “I didn’t go into environmental work really liking the science-y part of it.”

But as she dug into the data, Silva said she began to see connections between environmental conditions and social movements she’d previously expressed an interest in. Then one day when perusing the , she noticed the Hood ice cream plant near her home had been identified as a hazardous waste site.

“Being one of the people who do live within this one-mile radius of the facility, it made me concerned, because I had no idea this was happening,” Silva said. “I had asked my family about that, because we lived in our home for about 40 years, and they had no idea about it.”

After she was accepted into the Young Changemakers Fellowship last year, Silva said she and her peers were told to explore questions of equity as part of the projects they’d be working on throughout the year. Because Suffield — a relatively affluent and mostly white town — has few places that are affordable for low-income residents, Silva said she decided to make the plant the subject of her project.

Silva focused on the plant’s proximity to a local housing development, Brook Hill Village, which town officials identified as one of the only developments utilizing government assistance for affordable family housing in a . Residents of the census tract containing the development, she also noted, are more likely to be racial or ethnic minorities than in other areas of town.

Through her research, Silva identified 24 instances in which the Hood plant reported spills or chemical releases to the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. Those incidents involved ammonia, diesel fuel, wastewater and, , 2,000 gallons of chocolate ice cream mix that that seeped out of a container into the plant.

While Silva’s report did not identify any specific instances in which Brook Hill Village residents suffered harmful health effects from the plants’ releases, she argued that its operations contributed to the area’s “moderate-high” environmental burden — a designation laid out in the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s .

(The database was one of several federal public health websites that a judge in February after the Trump administration sought to pull them offline, citing to other outlets that the data did not conform with presidential executive orders related to diversity and gender identity. A notice now posted atop the ATSDR states, “This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department rejects it.”)

Before she could publish her findings, however, Silva said she and her peers were told by a fellowship supervisor at NOAA that if they chose continue with their projects they would have to remove any mention of their affiliation with the agency, its fellowship or the NAAEE, the nonprofit association supporting the fellowship.

Fortunately, Silva had already completed most of the work on her project and was able to quickly pivot to getting support from the Conservation Law Foundation as well as the Sierra Club and the Nonprofit Accountability Group, an advocacy organization based in Hartford. Representatives from each of those groups agreed to sign a cover letter endorsing Silva’s project, which she said lent credence to findings after it lost backing from NOAA.

Silva said that some of her peers in the program have found it more difficult to continue their work, particularly those whose projects relied on government-licensed GIS mapping software.

“They’re just devastated, but also angry,” Silva said. “We have our own group chat and everyone was blowing up like, ‘Oh my god, I didn’t expect this.'”

Ultimately, Silva published her findings earlier this month in a report that was sent to local officials in Suffield as well as Hood. She included a list of several recommendations for the company, including the installation of new chemical sensors to monitor releases, distributing fact sheets and engaging in community outreach with residents of the surrounding area.

Hood did not respond to requests for comment about Silva’s findings.

“Keila has done amazing research in her community to address an important pollution issue,” said Samantha Dynowski, the Connecticut state director for the Sierra Club. “The arbitrary decision of the Trump administration to cut off resources for this kind of work was unneeded and shouldn’t have been done.”

Since the meeting on Feb. 18, Silva said she and her peers have received emails from federal staffers working with the fellowship soliciting ideas for future meetings between now and the program’s end date in June. In addition, she said they’ve offered to provide advice for professional development and future careers, which for Silva means becoming an environmental justice attorney.

Silva said she’s planning to put the $750 honorarium she received as part of the fellowship towards college, and is waiting to hear back on applications to “around 20” schools where she is considering studying anthropology, sociology or public policy starting in the fall.

“It’s just kind of matter of making things fit, and adapting,” she said.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.