About Namahana School
A Visionary Education
At Namahana School, we envision learning that is grounded in our unique community and culture, launching future leaders with the tools to transform the world they will inherit.
Namahana School is deeply rooted in its unique social, historical, and geographic context, while bravely facing broader challenges and opportunities in the world at large. Drawing strength from profound relationships with the people and places of Koʻolau and Haleleʻa, we seek to cultivate our children’s aloha for their home and transform it into concrete tools for stewarding the world they will inherit. A Namahana education is inspired by its singular setting, driven by the authentic interests and passions of its students, and shaped by cutting edge approaches to 21st-century teaching and learning.
At-a-Glance
Opening
2025*
Grades Served
7 - 12
* grades 7 & 8 only for 2025-2026 school year
Students Total
360
Students per Grade
60
We recognize the challenges faced by our community, and we believe that Namahana offers an opportunity to solve them together.
Our Community
The cascading green cliffs of the Namahana mountain range catch gold afternoon light that playfully pursues cloud shadows through their cool valleys. While the distant hum of traffic along Kūhio highway is a reminder of the rapidly changing landscape on the North Shore of Kauaʻi, the regal silence of these mountains connects us to the timeless wisdom of the land itself.
Ka ʻāina (the land that feeds us) is what anchors us to this singular place. As it sustained communities of old from the mountains to the sea, this storied landscape continues to nourish and bring us together in common cause.
For millennia, the Namahana mountain range has provided the source of life for the areas fed by its many streams and forests. Mount Namahana, one of its highest peaks, is the piko (life source) for the ahupuaʻa (land division) of Kīlauea and Kalihiwai.
Generations of Kauaʻi chiefs, their legacy echoed in our school name, carefully stewarded the people of these ahupuaʻa (land divisions) with a reverence for the natural world that was their foundation. Their enduring aloha (love) for this place inspires us to educate the future guardians and leaders of Kauaʻi.
Our Challenge
Far From Home
For decades, families up and down the North Shore of Kauaʻi have dreamed of a public middle and high school where all of our children can continue to be educated with the care they experience at Hanalei and Kīlauea elementary schools. Currently, they must shoulder exhausting commutes of up to three hours per day, often by bus, to Kapaʻa or beyond. Often compounded by rush-hour traffic, road closures due to extreme weather or infrastructure repairs, these commutes can interfere with our children’s personal and academic wellbeing. While there have been several attempts to establish local private schools over the years, none have lasted – in part because they lacked sufficient community engagement to sustain them.
A Unique Way of Life
Our North Shore communities of Koʻolau and Haleleʻa are also struggling with a complex set of challenges that threaten to unravel the unique social fabric that sustains us. As one of the most isolated areas in Hawaiʻi, our coast preserved a deliberately slow and simple way of life that has disappeared in other parts of the Islands.
Many residents still farm, hunt, or fish to feed their families. Specific stretches of reef or upland lookouts are still referred to by their old Hawaiian names, which highlight cultural, historical, or ecological elements of a landscape that was always inseparable from its people. Our strong ethos of cooperation and tightly woven relationships survived centuries of change, including decades of welcoming new neighbors from elsewhere in Hawai‘i and around the world. Those of us who chose to stay learned to listen, becoming a part of this community as we found ways to give back and share responsibility for its wellbeing.
But like the swelling tides of tourism that have put us on the global map of fashionable destinations, the pace of change is accelerating beyond our capacity to integrate. “Everyone knew everyone” is a phrase often heard when describing the tight-knit towns that hug our meandering coastline, “but now we hardly recognize each other,” is the statement that usually follows.
A Shifting Landscape
These demographic shifts have peaked in recent years, amplified by the COVID-19 Pandemic and a new normal of remote work. Fierce competition for limited real estate is rapidly displacing multigenerational families who can no longer afford to pay even the property taxes on our ancestral lands, let alone rents on a par with San Francisco or New York. Hawaiian and local plantation families, who once represented a majority in the North Shore’s communities and were the crucible of its unique culture, find ourselves disappearing.
Because of our profound aloha for our home, we are committed to preserving the stories, values, and traditions that make life here so special. But it becomes hard not to also feel overwhelmed and saddened by the loss of our shared communal spaces, the destruction of ecosystems that can no longer sustain us. For those of us who arrived more recently, it becomes hard not to feel excluded, despite our genuine desire to learn and contribute to our new home.
Our Dream
As the very first public, tuition-free middle and high school for children on the North Shore of Kauaʻi, Namahana School is poised to address critical community needs in various ways. At a basic level, it will offer our families a geographically accessible post-primary school education, eliminating long commutes that rob children of valuable rest and recreational time. A closer middle and high school option will keep our keiki close to their ʻohana and connected to their communities. It will also free up opportunities for involvement in after-school and other enrichment, enabling students and parents to be more fully engaged in their education.
But at a deeper and perhaps more significant level, Namahana School offers a hopeful response to the dizzying socioeconomic and environmental changes on the North Shore. Not just another school, Namahana is a vision for community-based education rooted in place, culture, and real-world problem solving. It offers a lens through which the region’s unique strengths can be more fully understood and embraced by families both old and new. And it prepares children to address even the most complex challenges, empowering them to transform their world using a dynamic combination of traditional wisdom and global innovation.
“Namahana School is one of those collective endeavors that arise once in a generation. We are blessed and honored to be part of something that will transform our community in so many positive ways.”
Namahana School Governing Board Chair
Make a donation.
You can help make Namahana School a reality. We are actively seeking supporters for the building of our campus in time for a target opening of in Fall 2025.