The damaged front building of King Kamehameha III Elementary School is shown on Aug. 12. A Department of Education plan to temporarily bus displaced Lahaina students to Central and South Maui schools came under fire on Thursday as teachers and parents raised concerns about rushing traumatized kids back to school and away from their grieving community.

After the Aug. 8 wildfire destroyed her Lahaina home, Puanani Pali hasn’t had much time to think about where her kids should be going to school.

“For the past two weeks I have been scrambling just trying to get my family’s basic needs met,” said Pali, a parent and substitute teacher. “My ohana and I haven’t even had the time to start healing our traumas yet.”

Nearly three weeks after school was supposed to start, Pali and other parents face a dilemma over where to send their kids — to Lahaina campuses that they worry could be contaminated by ash and smoke or to Central and South Maui schools where they’ll be driven past the ruins of their town, far from a community that’s already struggling with loss and grief.

“One, I do not believe it is safe to send my keiki back to Lahaina campuses due to the environmental impacts including air and water contamination,” Pali told the state Board of Education on Thursday. “Two, it is also not healthy for my keiki to see the devastation of our town on a daily basis. Doing so I feel will only inflict further trauma and delay the healing process. Three, as Lahaina natives, I want to keep my keiki in West Maui as much as possible, as this is our one hanau, the sands of our birth.”

The state Department of Education says 3,001 students were enrolled in the four Lahaina public schools on the day of the fire. Since then, 538 have re-enrolled in other public schools and 438 have enrolled in the State Distance Learning Program. That leaves 2,025 students who haven’t opted for another school or virtual learning, though some may have moved out of state or enrolled in private schools.

The fire destroyed King Kamehameha III Elementary, and the other three schools — Princess Nahi’ena’ena Elementary, Lahaina Intermediate and Lahainaluna High — remain closed for air, water and soil testing.

The DOE announced Wednesday that four Central and South Maui schools would serve as temporary sites for displaced Lahaina students. Many told the board that this caught them off guard.

“Were my daughter and her classmates supposed to show up at Lokelani Intermediate School today? Without any additional staffing or a plan in place for them to be educated, counseled, cared for?” asked Lahainaluna teacher Mike Landes, a parent of students and a husband of a Princess Nahi’ena’ena Elementary teacher who was testifying as an individual Thursday. “Not only that but now those students and families still living in West Maui find out that kids will be bused through the burnt wreckage of their community to attend schools on the other side of the island. For many students that will mean sending them directly past where their own home once stood, where their favorite memories were made, where their loved ones perished in the fire.”

Victoria Zupancic, curriculum AP testing and Title I coordinator at Lahainaluna High School, said the DOE “waited until the last moment to tell us our fate for the coming days.”

“We have folks that have been in a state of trauma for weeks, and they can’t calm down because they don’t know if Monday we’re going to have to go to school and look into the faces of 30 children who may have lost their homes,” said Zupancic, who was testifying as an individual on Thursday. “We have reporters asking us for the names of our missing students and scam lawyers and insurance headaches. You’re not helping. You’re adding to our stress.”

Hawaiian immersion teachers said taking their students away from Lahaina would be especially difficult after the devastation of the fires, and another setback after years of working to bring preschool to 12th grade kula kaiapuni sites to Lahaina.

“While I applaud the DOE’s effort for establishing temporary sites in Central and South Maui, this option for keiki to leave Lahaina to be educated in our public school system is not ideal for many ohana with strong ties to Lahaina, especially for our keiki kaiapuni,” said Kanoelani Steward, a kumu at Ke Kula Kaiapuni o Lahaina. “Busing our keiki out of Lahaina and us leaving Lahaina further displaces us from our home that we have already lost to the fire.”

Steward also had concerns about returning to campus even with the environmental testing, pointing to the shifting winds from Lahaina town, where the rubble of many homes and buildings remains. She said some landowners in Napili are “on standby,” willing to provide space for Hawaiian immersion students.

As some kids do go back to school, local pediatricians said mental health safeguards need to be in place for parents, teachers and students.

“We all know that the best way to help children experiencing a trauma is to give them a familiar setting with a regular schedule and safe adults to lean on,” said Dr. Casandra Simonson, a pediatrician with Malama I Ke Ola and a representative of the Hawaii Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “School is the ideal vehicle to deliver this remedy to their suffering. Without it they may never stop feeling like they are in fight or flight mode, like they are still running from the fire. Their parents need respite to work and gather themselves. Keiki also must not be repeatedly exposed to the source of the trauma. They should not be subject to seeing the disaster area during their commute.”

Dr. Melissa Kim, who’s also a pediatrician with Malama I Ke Ola and a representative of the Hawaii Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said that past disasters like 9/11 have shown that about 30 percent of children who experience this kind of devastation are diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. Taking the roughly 3,000 kids at Lahaina public schools, that comes out to about 900 kids, “which Maui is sorely unable to handle,” Kim said.

“Little things such as a traffic jam has triggered one of the evacuees’ kids to flash back to that Lahaina time. … What would we expect him to be like if he has to drive past the Lahaina town twice a day?” Kim asked.

DOE Superintendent Keith Hayashi told community members that the stories and concerns they shared were “very important to us.”

“I’ve learned a lot and our team has learned a lot from listening today,” Hayashi said. “We are very much committed to helping our families, our communities and our students in moving forward.”

He said things “are very fluid … and they continue to evolve and change in ways that it’s difficult to predict. Information is coming from many different places as we try to synthesize that and make the best decisions possible.”

“I think one of the things we can do is continue to work together and asking the board for flexibility in allowing us the latitude to be able to move quickly in directions that are needed that may not be traditional,” Hayashi told the board.

Lahaina teachers are reporting to a site in Kapalua today, and the DOE will be holding two meetings on Wednesday to get input from the community and discuss reopening the schools. The meetings will take place from 9 to 11 a.m. at Citizen Church at 4275 Hine Way in Kahana, and from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Maui Arts & Cultural Center’s McCoy Studio Theater at 1 Cameron Way in Kahului.

Principals of all four Lahaina public schools will be in attendance, along with the complex area superintendent and the DOE superintendent.

* Managing Editor Colleen Uechi can be reached at cuechi@mauinews.com.