Hawaii Middle School Student’s Transformation: 2025 Update!
This post is a follow up to our 2024 article, detailing the students at Keʻelikolani Middle School’s remarkable turnaround through participating in the Love Peace Harmony Youth Program. After facing behavioral challenges, low academic performance, and high detention and absenteeism rates in 2022, the school engaged our local volunteers to offer regular sessions. Within a year, detention rates dropped, schoolwide test scores rose and teachers reported improved behavior, concentration, and academic performance.
We now join the students at the end of their semester, with the school recently receiving a visit from Congressman Ed Case, personally delivered a donation of books to the school from the Library of Congress. Congressman Case met Librarian Holly Gates, whose class hosts our Love Peace Harmony program and calligraphies, and in a stroke of good luck, our team happened to be there at the same time, and had the opportunity to meet Congressman Case.
(Pictured left to right: LPH volunteer Diane Fujio, Congressman Ed Case, LPH volunteers Sophie Ann Aoki and Joanne Tachibana, and school Principal Joe Passantino)
Principal Joe Passantino shared with Congressman Case about the Love Peace Harmony program, and how it has made a difference for their school. Congressman Case was impressed, and expressed his interest in hearing more about the program.
Ms. Gates reports that the children have kept up their positive academic performance, and she is very pleased with this.
The other classroom that hosts our Love Peace Harmony programs and calligraphy field is their special education program. These children—who were once withdrawn—since beginning the Love Peace Harmony program in 2022, have gradually become more and more enthusiastic in participating, even so much as confidently leading meditations and singing of their own desire. The calligraphies for Love, Peace, and Harmony were once located in the corner of the classroom, but since the program became a student-favorite, the calligraphies have been moved to the middle of the classroom, front and center. Now, during the program, the students will go up to the calligraphies and practice with them on their own, get out their musical instruments, start playing, some who wouldn’t sing before are now singing, and some are so engaged, they even led the session themselves—they have truly made it their own, exactly how it is meant to be.
LPH Volunteer Diane Fujio shares with us, “One boy with autism used to feel so overstimulated he would scream, and to help, he would wear headphones. Now, he doesn’t scream any more or get upset, he even participates in the session. The four teaching aids in the room are feeling the difference too, they now not only stay for the program, but actively participate as well.”
A special thanks to ‘Aunty’ Diane Fujio who provided this update, and to all of our stellar LPH volunteers who have been delivering LPH programs and making the difference in the lives of the students at Ke’elikolani Middle School in Hawaii. Mahalo to you all.
Author: Zakota Nesbitt is Love Peace Harmony’s Community Engagement & Media Coordinator, with 15+ years writing experience, both professionally and creatively. He a passionate community-builder, and an amateur scholar of comparative world mythology, philosophy, and mysticism, a student of herbalism, as well as an avid practitioner of Qi Gong, Tai Chi, and Zen meditation since 2015. Zakota has been a Love Peace Harmony volunteer since 2016.