Castle High School lawn-mowing schedule to be altered for fewer instruction disruptions

Castle High School students may soon be able to attend class without lawnmowers disrupting their lessons after strong advocacy by the school’s teachers and the Hawaii State Teachers Association.

Castle educators, with the help of HSTA Windward Oahu UniServ Director Beverly Ikalani, filed and resolved a Step 1 grievance over loud lawn mowing just outside classroom windows during instruction hours. A Step 1 grievance occurs after a solution can’t be reached through an informal discussion.

“The noise is super, super, super loud,” Castle High English and Language Arts teacher Lia Cornair said. “They’re so close to us. It’s a 30-minute process on two sides of the building. You lose an hour.

“The kids started to be trained to think: when the lawnmower goes off, it’s time to chill, like ‘We get a little bit of a break.’ And as educators, once that mindset gets instilled in the kids, you lose them,” she added.

Katrina Souza, an English teacher at Castle High, says the disruptions cause a massive setback in their students’ learning. “It’s crazy. Add up those minutes of how much of English class that kid is missing, because every other Wednesday for more than half the period, they can’t even hear what the teacher is saying, what the students are saying to each other,” she said. “That’s a crazy amount of education being negatively impacted for that one class, that set of students. It’s insane, and parents have no clue about this, no clue that this is happening.”

The disruption violates Article VI-S of the contract (Classroom Interruptions) which states:

“Classroom interruptions shall be minimized. The Employer shall make reasonable efforts to eliminate excessive noise-producing activities during the school day. Assistance of other agencies may be sought if necessary to eliminate noise-producing activities.”

Souza says she endured lawn mowing for her entire 18-year tenure there without involving HSTA because “as teachers, we all thought this was a hopeless issue.

“We’ve always been told, ‘There’s nothing we can do. There’s nothing we can do.’ For 18 years we’ve lived with this, this totally inappropriate teaching condition,” she said.

Souza also shared that teachers sometimes hesitate in speaking up out of fear of being the squeaky wheel, but “when it involves students so directly like this clearly did, it was really easy to speak up.”

In the past, lawn mowing occurred intermittently, so pinpointing the problem times was difficult for tracking the data necessary for filing a grievance. After the pandemic, the lawn mowing schedule became more regular, and on every other Wednesday, lawn mowing would occur for “hours at a time.”

Coupled with the pandemic and the need to mask and open their doors for ventilation, the mowing became too much to bear.

Ikalani, HSTA’s Windward UD, first heard about the situation from Kana Naipo, Castle High’s head faculty representative and Windward HSTA state director back in October 2021. From there, teachers wanted to work with their administration to get the situation resolved. They also reached out to interim Complex Area Superintendent Ed Noh and other outside agencies on a solution.

After months with no progress, the administration “threw their hands up” and suggested the teachers file a formal grievance with HSTA to get the situation resolved.

The union submitted a grievance to Noh on March 23, and on April 8, a hearing between Noh, Castle teachers, and UD Ikalani took place during which teachers explained the problem and proposed a solution: Lawnmowers should change their on-campus day from Wednesday to Friday, a day when new content isn’t typically introduced.

After a collaborative virtual meeting on May 6 between Ikalani, Noh, the school grounds maintenance supervisor, and two personnel regional officers, a schedule change for lawnmowers from Wednesday to Friday starting this June was solidified and the grievance was resolved and closed.

While the schedule change has yet to take effect, both Cornair and Souza are hopeful it will help. Even more, they are hoping to raise awareness about this issue for other schools.

“You can resolve it at your school because maybe the more schools complain, then the facilities management will realize, ‘Hey, we got to do something about flexing our people’s schedules,’” Souza said.

As for working with the union to get this situation resolved, “Beverly was very responsive,” Souza said. “She was very, very clear about what our next steps would be. She was very supportive whenever we were willing to go from informal to formal grievance, and she understood what we were telling her. She was willing and was very quick in implementing the next steps that had to happen in order to file a formal grievance.”’

For those facing difficult situations, Souza advises others to talk to their Association Policy Committee (APC) representative.

“First, try to resolve it with your admin,” Souza said. “Then I would really encourage them to use the APC, their faculty reps, to try to seek resolution there. Just know that if nothing gets resolved, the grievance process is there. They have really solid suggestions of how to build your case, and they will follow through on your behalf.”

Ikalani shared that the true work of a UniServ Director is advocating and reinforcing Chapter 89, the collective bargaining rights of all of our members.

“Our bottom line mission is that we have to support our teachers, and we help them to bring out their voice so that they help to effect that change,” Ikalani said. “A lot of teachers say, ‘I don’t want to say anything. I don’t want to be retaliated against.’ And I say, ‘But there is a provision in the contract that protects you from that, and that’s why you have a contract.’ We have the duty to represent and enforce that contract and teachers do too.”

Has your UniServ director or any of your HSTA school-level leaders, e.g., head faculty or grievance representative, or Association Policy Committee, helped you solve an issue at your school? If you’re willing to share your story, please let us know by submitting an online contact form here.