She spent 34 years on the HSTA staff, retiring as executive director
Posted: October 4, 2023
Joan Lee Husted, one of the Hawaiʻi State Teachers Association’s founding mothers, died Monday. She was 85 years old and passed away peacefully at her Makiki home under hospice care, her family said.
Husted’s legendary prowess as a shrewd negotiator and tireless teacher advocate created a strong foundation for the union in its early days — a formidable structure that’s endured well beyond her three-plus decades of service to the union.
Husted joined the HSTA staff in July 1973, first serving as director of field services. She later became HSTA’s chief negotiator, deputy executive director, and its first female executive director, retiring from that position in 2007. She negotiated 15 collective bargaining agreements for teachers during her time with the union.
HSTA President Osa Tui, Jr. said, “It is with heavy hearts that the HSTA community mourns the loss of our longtime and fierce advocate for thousands of public educators in Hawaiʻi. With the bravery of a lion, Joan was fearless in taking on the Department of Education, be it across the negotiating table or over the airwaves. Our educators today have so much to be thankful to Joan for as we benefit from the wins she secured during her decades of service to HSTA.
“Even in her final years of retirement, she put her skills to work by helping to expose the financial mismanagement of the DOE and working to support educators through her advocacy with the Hawaiʻi Education Association,” Tui added. The Hawaiʻi Education Association (HEA) is an advocacy organization, separate from the HSTA, dedicated to affirming the professionalism of Hawaiʻi teachers and supporting excellence in education.
“We send Joan’s ʻohana and loved ones our deepest condolences as we remember and celebrate her numerous accomplishments as well as her unwavering dedication to the public schools of Hawaiʻi,” Tui said.
Motokawa: ‘Her love of education came through every time she spoke’
June Motokawa, HSTA’s president from 1994 to 1998, remembered Husted with love and reverence.
“She was most respected and highly regarded by me and so many teachers. I truly believe that without Joan Husted, educators in Hawaii would not be where we are today,” Motokawa said.
“Her love of education came through every time she spoke. And nobody could deny that. She was certainly on top of all the issues and laws regarding education and bargaining. She was like a walking encyclopedia,” she added.
“We still have many issues and she continued to be on top of them,” even in retirement, Motokawa added, noting that Husted served as vice president of the Hawaiʻi Education Association for the last five years. Motokawa served as president of the nonprofit.
“Her love for teaching and teachers was constant. And she never said a bad word about anybody,” Motokawa said.
If anything, she would joke, she said.
“She used to say that Ben gave me all my white hair,” Motokawa recalled, referring to Ben Cayetano, who served as governor when the HSTA last went on strike in 2001.
Takabayashi: ‘I don’t think there could be a stronger advocate for teachers’
Roger Takabayashi served as HSTA’s president from 2003 to 2009, during Husted’s final years with HSTA when she headed the union and its staff as executive director.
“She advocated for teachers without any reservations, without any other consequences in mind. Just whatever’s good for teachers is good for everybody,” Takabayashi said.
“I don’t think there could be a stronger advocate for teachers,” he added.
“Joan wouldn’t want to quit bargaining if there were potential dollars on the table. You couldn’t end a bargaining session early, because there’s money on the table to be gotten for teachers, and she’d be there to get it for them,” Takabayashi recalled.
“She’s as tough as you can get,” he said.
Wilbert Holck, who retired as HSTA’s executive director in the summer of 2022, said Husted hired him to represent teachers in Central and Leeward Oʻahu in 1989 when he was a teacher at Kaiser High.
“There has never been anyone as passionate about the profession and teaching and teachers as Joan was. And I don’t know that we will ever see that again,” Holck said.
“She taught me the ropes. She was a great mentor and inspiration for me,” Holck added.
“Joan is one of the toughest and smartest people I know,” he said.
Husted last addressed thousands of public school teachers in 2018, when she spoke at HSTA’s Institute Day gatherings on five islands across the state, explaining the many gains the union had made for teachers and the students they serve.
Lewis: ‘I look at our contract. That’s the book Joan wrote.’
Joan Kamila Lewis, an instructional coach at Kapolei High who served three terms as HSTA’s vice president, said, “When we talk about modern Hawaiian history and the labor movement, she should be in our history books. You can’t talk about the gains we had as a profession and not talk about Joan Husted.”
Shortly after Lewis began her teaching career in 1989, she remembers hearing Husted address educators at an HSTA Institute Day.
“Joan had a way of giving a speech that made you think she was talking directly to you,” Lewis recalled.
“She talked about how everyone who came before stepped up for us and how it’s our responsibility to help the next generation,” Lewis added.
“Here’s this woman that was like a walking encyclopedia of all things labor in Hawaii. It’s like she knew everybody, and she cared about everybody and she paid attention to everybody,” she said.
“She was formidable. She didn’t suffer fools gladly,” Lewis said.
“The thing I’ve been thinking about all day. I look at our contract. That’s the book Joan wrote,” said Lewis.
After Husted retired from HSTA in 2007 to care for her brother, “She did not stop serving,” Lewis said.
At the time of her death, Husted served in several key community leadership roles, including vice president of the Hawaiʻi Education Association, the non-profit that Lewis leads as president; vice president of the Education Institute of Hawaiʻi, a think tank that advocates for empowerment and innovation in schools; and as a commissioner on The Education Commission of the States.
Husted: At first, powerbrokers dismissed HSTA as ‘little old ladies in tennis shoes’
Husted moved to Oʻahu from Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1966, and became a counselor at King Intermediate School in Kāneʻohe, later serving as a district resource teacher for Windward Oʻahu.
In 1971, she served as chair of HSTA’s Negotiations Committee. She was one of the first employees to join the HSTA in 1973 and served in various key leadership roles at the union until she retired as executive director in 2007, after 34 years at HSTA.
In an interview with the HSTA in 2021, she said the men in charge of state government when teachers began to organize in the islands felt “there are too many women in the public schools. They won’t be a union,” during the debate about passing Hawaii’s collective bargaining law in 1968 and 1969.
“HSTA gave credibility to teachers,” Husted said, noting that people used to dismiss them as “little old ladies in tennis shoes. ‘We don’t have to worry about them.’ And then we became a force. Teachers, because of their willingness to stand up for what they believe in, bring credibility, and we stopped hearing about little old ladies in tennis shoes.
“We were the most consistent advocates for the kids. We used to say good teaching conditions are good learning conditions for students. Whether it was closing the schools because of the asbestos or (advocating for smaller) class size, going after early childhood education, we were consistently at every hearing, talking to everybody who would listen,” added Husted.
Joan Husted talks about the origins of HSTA in this 2016 interview with ThinkTech Hawaii.
“My best advice is to stay together,” said Husted. “There is power in unity, and we have demonstrated that all throughout HSTA’s existence. When people said it couldn’t be done, we went and did it.
“Old-timers like myself have to have our ears open and our eyes open so we can hear the new things that the younger teachers want to have accomplished,” Husted added. “The best decision-makers at the school are the people who work at the school, not the people who work in the Liliuokalani Building (the Hawaiʻi State Department of Education headquarters). So stay together.”
Husted is survived by her daughter, Tina (Rodney) Lacy of Makiki, as well as a grandson, granddaughter and great-grandson, and brother Harry Robert Husted of Texas.
Plans for a memorial service are pending.
Featured headshot courtesy of the Hawaiʻi Education Association. Photos below courtesy of the Hawaiʻi State Teachers Association.
