HSTA-Retired Oʻahu District wins national award from NEA-Retired

Members of HSTA-Retired Oʻahu District recently won a national award from NEA-Retired for an innovative program in which public school students taught retired teachers basic smartphone skills.

At the NEA-Retired Annual Meeting in Portland, Ore., in late June, the group was honored with first place, winning the Tom Wellman Spirit of Membership Award.

Candace Chun, the former events chair of HSTA-Retired Oʻahu said, “We wanted to try to get the kids to have experience speaking in front of adults and making presentations because a lot of them were young yet, and they weren’t used to it. So that was one of our big goals: to help the schools and help ourselves.”

Chun added that among her membership, “A lot of the people have trouble with cell phones.”

“We wanted to affect public education, but also build our leadership capacity among our council members,” Chun added.

To begin planning the event, HSTA-Retired representatives contacted Keri Reese, a business career and technical education teacher at Waiʻanae High School.

“They reached out to us to try to see if we wanted to collaborate on something to help both sides. The kids need to develop professional skills, including communication, leadership, and public speaking. And HSTA-Retired also wanted to be able to provide that service for their members,” Reese said.

“We took it back to the classroom for the kids to look at and decide on what they felt their strengths were, or what they were willing to challenge themselves to build up skills to be able to teach that,” Reese added. “So they really took over in planning and creating the event after we got the suggestions from the HSTA-Retired.”

Reese guided her students to “create an outline of what they wanted or what needed to be taught in steps. The students created PowerPoints because we attached them to QR codes to help them (retired teachers) learn about how technology is currently being used so that they could access the PowerPoints from the QR codes.”

The Waiʻanae High students then attended the HSTA-Retired Oʻahu District’s fall membership meeting to make their presentations and offer one-on-one or small-group help to the 90 retirees in attendance to help them learn new smartphone skills. The workshop was called “Smartphone Skills Simplified.”

“We had presenters who were the experts on that specific topic on the stage, going over the topic and the instructions. And then we had the rest of our student ambassadors walking around and then supporting the tables and the retired teachers,” Reese said.

“Besides compassion for our kupuna (elders) and building and strengthening the relationship between the generations, the students built public speaking skills, which help them to lead into our (state and national student) competitions that we participate in outside of school,” Reese added.

Chun, the HSTA-Retired member, summed up the program and said, “All this stuff we’re doing with the kids is to support public education. This award also supports public education.”

Chun said the district “figured out the most pressing needs of our members” and then set up programs to help them.

The group previously partnered with a former Health Academy teacher at Waiʻanae High to bring students to train retirees in a workshop called “Bystanders Can Save Lives.” The students conducted presentations and hands-on demonstrations about bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), the use of an automated external defibrillator (AED) for cardiac arrest victims and the Heimlich Maneuver for choking victims.

The next session will tap into culinary and marine science students’ expertise this fall in a retirees’ workshop called “Healthy Eating Choices.”

Chun said that this effort is aimed at building “strong leadership to eventually lead to better meetings for our members and hopefully lead to better membership results as we partner with the public school students. We can still support public education in our state, even as retired teachers, and help our members to grow with the help of our active teachers and very capable students. We hope more active teachers look to join HSTA-Retired upon retirement.”

The photo above features (left to right) HSTA-Retired O’ahu Vice President Valerie Chun-Urima; Former HSTA O’ahu Events Chair Candace Chun; and NEA-Retired Officers: Anita Gibson, president; Jean Dobashi, vice-president; and Marilyn Warner, secretary. (Photo credit Stephen Fong)