Union honors ʻAlohilani Rogers for her dedication to preserving Hawaiian language, customs with her students
Posted: April 15, 2025
The Hawaiʻi State Teachers Association’s STACY Award for Teaching Excellence recognizes a teacher who demonstrates leadership, dedication, and passion in five categories: scholarship, teaching, advocacy, community, and youth. It is one of the highest honors bestowed by the union.
This year’s recipient is Mālia ʻAlohilani Kuala Rogers, or as she prefers to be called, ʻAlohilani, a Hawaiian immersion and resource teacher at Kawaikini Public Charter School on Kauaʻi. HSTA recognized Rogers at its annual state convention on April 12.
Rogers chose to become a teacher in Hawaiian language education so that the children of Hawai’i could once again speak the Hawaiian language.
“Hearing the story of my grandmother and being punished for speaking Hawaiian in Hawai’i, it made me feel like there was a responsibility that I had, I put upon myself and my family, that we had to do something. This wasn’t right, and we had to fix it,” Rogers said.
“So that’s why we started the school. We wanted to have some place where it was just normal to hear the Hawaiian language being spoken,” she added.
Rogers has spent her entire 32-year career as a Hawaiian immersion teacher. Her first teaching jobs in the Hawaiʻi State Department of Education were at Kapaʻa Elementary and Kapaʻa Middle. She then helped open Kawaikini Public Charter School, a Hawaiian immersion school in Līhuʻe, in 2008, where she has taught since.
In her role at Kawaikini, Rogers helps her 12th-grade students with their graduation requirements, including making their kīhei (shawl) that they will wear at graduation ceremonies, creating the bamboo stamps that adorn the kīhei, making colors for the kīhei out of plant paints, making their maile lei, and helping with their ʻawa ceremony and oli (Hawaiian chant).
She also serves as a resource teacher and helps with the schoolʻs WASC (Accrediting Commission for Schools, Western Association of Schools and Colleges) accreditation process.
Rogers believes that hands-on, ʻāina-based learning is “authentic learning, and it makes sense to do it in an authentic place.”
“That’s one of the philosophies that drive me as a teacher, too, that if any, every possible way we can have an authentic learning experience, that’s what we’re going to do. The ōlelo no’eau [Hawaiian proverb] that works with that is ‘Ma ka hana ka ʻike,’ so it’s in the work that you know or that you learn the knowledge,” she said.
Rogers is a teacher leader at her school and mentors new teachers. She also serves as a member of HSTA’s Hawaiian Education Special Committee, and recently traveled to Washington D.C. to advocate for Hawaiian education. She often travels to Oʻahu to advocate for her teacher colleagues, her school, and Hawaiian immersion.
She said, “We have such wonderful teachers with that passion, not just at our school, but just teachers in general, with that passion to see kids succeed, to help them move forward, and for the language to live.
Whatever I can do to help move that profession and the learning forward, because really, it all comes back down to the kids. If we can do a better job as teachers, then the kids benefit.”
Rogers’ goal is to instill in her students a sense of belonging and pride in their heritage.
“I want them to leave knowing that, to be proud of where they come from and being proud of where they’ve grown up, and this unique culture here in Hawai’i, and the Hawaiian language, is a huge part of that. So I would hope that the students leave believing in themselves and believing in who they are and where they come from can take them wherever they want to go.”
The HSTA STACY Award for Teaching Excellence program was established to celebrate the exemplary work of the late Stacy Nishina, an outstanding public school teacher and longtime staff member of HSTA. As the recipient of this year’s award, ʻAlohilani Rogers will be HSTA’s nominee for the NEA Foundation’s Horace Mann Award for Teaching Excellence and NEA Member Benefits Award.