He looks back on accomplishments, regrets and thanks HSTA members
Posted: June 30, 2021
As Hawaii State Teachers Association President Corey Rosenlee’s term comes to a close, he said his biggest takeaway from six years heading the statewide teachers’ union is that “unity is our biggest strength.”
HSTA’s state officers are limited to two three-year terms and Rosenlee’s second term ends Sunday.
He will return to the classroom next school year at Campbell High to teach social studies.
Rosenlee said, “I’m having to dig out my old lesson plans and try to remember some of the essential skills there. I am glad, though, that at least my classroom will be air-conditioned. So that’s one of the nice changes,” since he left Campbell to become president in 2015.
Initial plans are for Rosenlee to teach two sections of sociology/psychology, Participation in Democracy and Modern History of Hawaii.
Like other front-line educators, he will have to once again endure the teacher evaluation process.
“I always feel bad for the vice principal who has to evaluate me because it ends up being a two-hour conversation on educational theory,” he said with a laugh. “The poor soul.”
His colleagues at Campbell High paid tribute to Rosenlee in words and video last month, reflecting on his impact as a leader statewide and at the school where he taught for nine years before being elected HSTA president.
Rosenlee’s roots and early activism
Rosenlee’s mother was a special education teacher at Wilson and Princess Kaiulani elementary schools on Oahu. His father was a professor of social work at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and started the nonprofit Adult Friends for Youth.
“I always say I got the teaching from my mom and the social activism from my father,” Rosenlee said.
When he first began teaching at Campbell, “It was 100 degrees in the classroom and I just couldn’t believe that they would put children in that environment. I was doing the best I could to teach, but the kids just had their heads down because it was so hot, I couldn’t blame them,” he said.
That situation prompted Rosenlee to start advocating for more air-conditioning in classrooms, and he organized an AC rally at the state Capitol in 2014.
Several years before Rosenlee became HSTA president, teachers saw pay cuts and students had no school most Fridays of one school year, because of budget cuts that resulted in Furlough Fridays.
“I took my family and my young little daughter and joined other parents in a sit-in in the governor’s office. That started a conversation about how we properly fund education, even back then,” Rosenlee said.
“When Gov. (Neil) Abercrombie cut teachers’ salaries again and imposed a contract, I took the experience I had with the other protest movements to launch a work-to-the-rule movement,” which he said spread to other schools.
He said that’s when he started to think, “‘OK, what organization in Hawaii has the possibility to actually fix these things?’ And that’s when it dawned on me, the best organization to do that is HSTA. That’s when I decided to run for president.”
Rosenlee served on HSTA’s Government Relations Committee and was a board member on the union’s Leeward Chapter before becoming president.
“As I started to get involved as an activist, I started for the first time to attend HSTA meetings. And I always wish I had actually joined (in these activities) much earlier. It was really the things that I enjoyed, talking about government relations and talking about our government,” Rosenlee said.
Rosenlee looks back on HSTA’s biggest recent accomplishments
During his six-year term, Rosenlee said, “I’m really proud of how we have come together as a union.”
HSTA faced a big test with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Janus case, “which basically said, ‘You don’t have to pay to be part of the union.’ And I was really afraid that people would just want everything for free and not be part of it,” Rosenlee recalled.
Yet, so many members of our union chose to be part of HSTA, which Rosenlee said, “probably has the highest percentage of members of any teacher union in the entire United States. I think that says a lot about Hawaii and how we value a union.”
“That unity is our greatest strength,” he said.
He’s proud to have led HSTA members in dramatic action, such as leading a rally at the state Capitol with 6,000 educators in 2017, and prompting more than 16,000 pieces of testimony to be turned into lawmakers on bills trying to increase funding for schools.
“We were able to stay together, and we were able to fight together,” Rosenlee said.
He said he’s proudest of the shortage differentials that began in early 2020 for special education and Hawaiian language immersion teachers and were introduced or increased for those who work at hard-to-fill school locations such as Waianae and Nanakuli.
“It has bothered me tremendously that if you’re a child 20 minutes away from my home on Oahu’s Leeward Coast, students year after year are denied a qualified teacher,” Rosenlee said, noting that the shortage differentials targeted educators badly needed to teach students who are among our most vulnerable.
During the pandemic, when the Hawaii State Department of Education tried to eliminate teacher shortage differentials, HSTA members sent in 3,000 to 4,000 pieces of testimony, prompting the Board of Education to overrule the superintendent and instruct her to continue those educator payments.
“I’m really proud that during my presidency, we’ve gotten 2,000 rooms air-conditioned, we’ve made schools more energy-efficient, and as I’m speaking, there is a House Bill 613, that creates enough funding to finish the job of air-conditioning all of our schools,” Rosenlee said, noting that Gov. David Ige has put the bill on his list of potential vetoes.
“When I came into office, there was more and more pressure on standardized testing,” he said. “In the last six years, we’ve de-linked standardized testing from teacher evaluations, we removed punishment of schools if they didn’t get high enough test scores.”
In addition, schools have begun the transition from bubble tests to project-based learning for more authentic assessments, Rosenlee added.
Regrets and priorities still unfulfilled
His biggest regret?
“I really, really wanted to end compression,” Rosenlee said, referring to long-time teachers whose salaries are compressed and haven’t increased during tough financial times. That results in some teachers paid roughly the same salary even though a decade of experience separates them.
“Three times during my presidency, we were close to getting it (compression) fixed,” Rosenlee said, but for various reasons, including the pandemic, that problem never got solved.
One of Rosenlee’s key priorities when he got elected was to create a dedicated source of funds for education.
“My first year in office, we tried a one-percent general excise tax (GET). That didn’t pass. Then for two years, we tried to get a constitutional amendment to raise property taxes (on second homes worth $1 million or more) to fund education,” he said.
“It took so much work to get it on the ballot,” but then the state Supreme Court invalidated the question, essentially saying it was too confusing for voters, he added.
HSTA also tried to raise the hotel tax for education, and change the state constitution to guarantee a certain level of education funding, to no avail.
“I regret that we weren’t able to accomplish it. But I know that we tried really hard to do so,” Rosenlee said.
HSTA Vice President Osa Tui, Jr., who succeeds Rosenlee as president starting July 5, said, “Some of these things still remain as opportunities for the future. So the work doesn’t stop just because Corey Rosenlee has left the building,” during a video conversation between the two men during Rosenlee’s last week in office.
“I know how much you care about compression as well,” Rosenlee told Tui. “I really hope you’ll finally get it.”
What’s left that still needs improvement in public education in the islands?
“I have a list!” Rosenlee said enthusiastically.
“I really wish we could pay our teachers better,” but “you gotta find the funding to do it,” Rosenlee said. “There’s still so much work to be done out there.”
Rosenlee’s perspective changes after 6 years as president
“I wanted to change everything overnight,” Rosenlee said about his first year in office, when the union put together a detailed legislative proposal called “Schools Our Keiki Deserve” that was more than 40 pages long.
“It would have fixed education overnight, raised the GET by one percent. It was crazy,” he recalled.
After his first legislative session as HSTA president concluded in the spring of 2016, lawmakers set aside $100 million for school air-conditioning improvements, but the “Schools Our Keiki Deserve” bill died.
“And I remember feeling bad about that, not realizing at the time how hard it was to get $100 million for education,” Rosenlee said.
“Over those years, it was hard to take the accomplishments when they happened. You always felt bad that you never got more, you always want more,” he said.
Since that time, he learned to take things incrementally, appreciating the victories, “even if they aren’t as grand as you had hoped,” he said.
Rosenlee renewed his national board certification recently, and as part of the classroom lesson he submitted for recertification, he showed students the musical Schoolhouse Rock cartoon called, “I’m Just a Bill,” which explains how a legislative bill becomes a law.
“I told them ‘Ignore that, because that’s not the way it works.’ And I was trying to tell them how things work at the Legislature. I was teaching them, you’ve got to reach out not just to any legislator, but to the committee chairs,” he said.
Some HSTA members mistakenly think that teacher leaders such as chapter presidents, board members and committee chairs receive pay for their union service. But only the president is on the HSTA payroll.
“Our union is made up of volunteers,” whose service to HSTA pivoted like so many other things during the coronavirus pandemic, Rosenlee said.
“Our secretary-treasurer, Logan Okita, teaches full-time everyday and then afterward has to volunteer. All of our chapter presidents don’t get paid. We have thousands of volunteers, and I think sometimes teachers don’t realize how many of their fellow teachers volunteer and give up time to be part of the union,” he added.
Before the pandemic, HSTA would have members on neighbor islands who would have to endure waking up at 3 a.m. to drive to the airport and fly to Oahu for a one-day union meeting.
“Having to do Zoom (attending events online from their homes) has actually given some of our teacher volunteers more time back in their life,” he said.
While he missed seeing people in person, “I could go to a meeting on Kauai and then Zoom over to another big meeting in Kona and then still sit down with my family for dinner at night,” Rosenlee said.
His advice for someone who wants to get involved in the union?
Attend a representative assembly (known as RAs) in your chapter just once just to see what happens. “You might like it,” he said.
“Our chapter presidents are always looking for people to be part of committees and to get involved. And they’re always looking for people who have special talents,” Rosenlee said.
He suggests you ask your school-level leader when your next RA will be held and find out how to attend, either virtually or in person.
Rosenlee thanks officers, other volunteer teacher leaders and staff
Tui, the incoming HSTA president, told Rosenlee, “You have moved this union forward, and I was very glad to be part of your second term of your administration.”
“I hope that we can continue to make positive change going forward, and I just want to thank you for everything you’ve done,” Tui said.
Rosenlee said, “I’m sometimes very envious (of Tui). He’s definitely a lot more organized than I ever was. He’s very detail-oriented.”
“Osa’s a really good listener. It’s important for him to listen. And he really tries to work with people to get things done. I think we’re very lucky for our union,” Rosenlee said.
“He works so hard, I know I can’t keep up with him,” Rosenlee said.
Rosenlee recalled an important meeting at HSTA that Tui attended.
“At the time, Osa had a kidney stone. He stayed in the meeting with the kidney stone. I would have been gone,” Rosenlee said.
“He’s so passionate about what he does. He works so hard for our members and he really cares. Osa, you’re going to be a great state president, I wish you the best,” Rosenlee said.
Rosenlee thanked the state officers, HSTA staff and teacher leaders and volunteers across the state.
“I want to thank all of you. It has truly been a privilege to have been your state president for the last six years. I have so enjoyed meeting so many of you. And appreciate all the support,” he said.
Even though his union presidency is coming to a close, Rosenlee pledged, “I’ll continue to fight for education.”