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Cars for 7 Teachers
7 Cars for
7 Teachers Program
Rewards Top Hawaii
Educators.
2007 State and District Teacher of
the Year
award
ceremonies were held October 19 at a Board of
Education meeting
Hawaii’s franchised new car dealers have been awarding free cars (use for a year) to the State Teacher of the Year and the State’s District Teachers of the Year since the year 2000. This year, with the presentation of “7 Cars for 7 Teachers” at the Board of Education ceremonies 3:30 p.m., Thursday, October 19, 2006 at the Pearl City High School auditorium, the state’s auto dealers completed awarding 50 new cars to public school teachers.
The program was initiated by the Volkswagen Dealers Association of Hawaii in 1999 with the awarding of a new Volkswagen Jetta (use for a year) to the State Teacher of the Year. The following year, with thehelp of Hawaii auto distributors, other auto manufacturer ad associations, and individual auto dealers, the program was expanded to provide cars for public school teacher winners from all seven districts.
“Fifty cars for fifty teachers in the fiftieth state; that has a nice ring to it,” said Wayne De Luz, recently elected president of the Hawaii Automobile Dealers Association (HADA). “It’s a good milestone to celebrate.”
The HADA involvement began as part of a larger auto dealer-initiated effort to help the state public school system adopt annual gradeby- grade SAT9 testing in grades 3 through 8 and one year in high school, and to develop a $5 million “essential knowledge” grade-bygrade curriculum to improve student verbal reasoning skills.
The legislature adopted the dealersponsored SAT9 testing measure in 2003, but failed this year to establish funding for the auto dealer-proposed “essential knowledge” standardized curriculum—that was to be developed using county-based, state-based, and national-based curriculum experts. The $5 million in funding needed for the program failed to make it through the final hours of the legislative session.
The auto dealer-proposed standardized grade-by-grade curriculum program had earlier demonstrated remarkable effectiveness. Two Hawaii public elementary schools— Solomon Elementary and Kauluwela Elementary—had, in fact, earlier adopted the Core Knowledge program, a program similar to the one proposed by the auto dealers, and these schools, in 2003, were the only two schools, out of 100 or so high poverty schools in the state, to show annual yearly progress four years in a row.
Auto dealers believe that if the “essential knowledge” curriculum is indeed funded next year by the 2007 legislature and then adopted by the Department of Education, that Hawaii’s fourth grade reading scores will then climb from Hawaii’s current position, near the bottom of the state-by-state rankings, to near the top, in 72 months. The end result will be a better educated work force, say the dealers, and a better economy for all of Hawaii.
District winners:
To read the article on the 2005 annual
"7 Cars for 7 Teachers" event, click
here.
To read the article on the 2006 annual
"7 Cars for 7 Teachers" event, click
here.
