Education forum held last night

I was glad to read that last night's education forum brought out over 300 people, who came to support Hawai'i's public education reform and discuss how they can help.

It's hard to tell how effective the forum was in moving forward with improvements - perhaps it was more just an outlet for people's frustration. Regardless, it was good to see that there was a decent turnout and many people signed up to volunteer and/or pledged to lend support to various programs.

This came at the very end of the article and caught my attention:

Retired teacher Shirley Parola, 77, attended the forum to float this idea: Public education would improve if fewer parents sent their children to private school. "The fact that we have so many private schools is detrimental to the public school system," she said.

That's exactly what I wrote about in a previous post!