The Struggle was Real: The Journey - and Truth - of Founding a Charter School in Hawai‘i

Abstract

Starting a public charter school in Hawai‘i is a serious endeavor that requires time, energy, resources, people, partnerships, support, and luck. This dissertation is an autoethnography of the author, Alex Teece, who is the founding school leader for DreamHouse ‘Ewa Beach Public Charter School in the community of ‘Ewa, on the island of O‘ahu, and islands of Hawai‘i. The autoethnography studies the journey, struggles, failures, and experience of beginning a public charter school in the Hawaiian Islands. The journey is eventually broken out into two main categories - the how and the why of starting a school. Analysis is conducted on over seven years of thousands of artifacts and sets of data that inform findings and eventual recommendations for those considering beginning a school, or simply interested in the journey that one might embark upon.