In Mindi Cherry’s temporary first-grade classroom at King Kamehameha III Elementary School, the floors are warping. The windows leak when it rains. And the wasps have been sneaking in through the roofs.

It’s been more than three years since the August 2023 Lahaina wildfire burned down the campus at its iconic Front Street location, forcing more than 400 students and 40 staff to teach and learn at the temporary school in Kapalua.

The campus of 30 modular structures was built in just 95 days by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at a cost of $78.8 million. It opened in April 2024.

Earlier this month, an agency created by state lawmakers to build new schools in Hawai‘i unveiled plans for the long-awaited new elementary, with a tentative opening date of 2029, another three years away.

“Just day by day is how you take it,” Cherry said.

Most had hoped King Kamehameha III Elementary School could return to its original location. A 2024 Hawai‘i Department of Education survey of 485 participants — including Lahaina residents, school faculty and staff, alumni and others — found 67% supported the Front Street location. But the state says returning to that location isn’t feasible because of the impact to iwi kūpuna (ancestral burials) and the high risk of flooding.

In October, government officials announced the new $162 million school would be built on roughly 14 acres of Kamehameha Schools lands in Ku‘ia, which sits just below the Lahaina Bypass close to the town’s three other public schools. 

This year, state lawmakers passed a bill assigning the construction of Kamehameha III Elementary to the Hawai‘i School Facilities Authority, which was created in 2020 to oversee projects such as new public schools and teacher housing. 

Lawmakers also set aside $244.6 million for the project. It includes about $60 million for roads, $30 million for off-site infrastructure like utilities and drainage and $146 million for the buildings, said Kainoa Horcajo, whose firm The Mo‘olelo Group has been doing community outreach for the School Facilities Authority.

The first school project the authority had been set to tackle from the ground up was a new middle school for Central Maui, but that’s not expected to open until 2031, making Kamehameha III Elementary the first school the agency plans to complete, according to Liz Lee, planning officer for the School Facilities Authority.

“You couldn’t have asked for a more high-pressured project to deliver on,” Lee said.

Horcajo told residents at the county’s monthly recovery meeting in Lahaina on Oct. 7 that the school’s new campus design would be situated like a ring, with the classrooms and cafeteria encircling a central courtyard that would be protected from the winds coming off the mountain. Roads would surround the entire campus, providing easy access for evacuations as well as firebreaks. 

The plan calls for the school to be built to handle an enrollment of about 750 students at full buildout. Projections show opening enrollment in 2029 will likely be around 520 kids.

While it may take a decade to reach 750, “we want people to know that there’s enough room for people to come back home and that there will be space in the school for their kids,” Horcajo told the Hawai‘i Journalism Initiative last week.

Horcajo added time is of the essence: “We know that $146 million is not a lot, especially with the rising costs of construction.”

“We’re three years past the fire, right? We’re short on time. We’re short on money. And it’s in all of our just desperate interest to get this done correctly for Lahaina, for the kids, for the teachers, for the people of this place,” he said.

The state is eager to rebuild the school, not just to get teachers and students back to Lahaina, but also to avoid rising costs on the temporary campus land that it leases from Maui Oceanview LP, the developer behind the 304-acre Pulelehua residential and retail master-planned community. 

According to the Hawai‘i Department of Education, the lease agreement set annual rent for the campus’ first three years at $1. On Sept. 11, rent went up to $180,000 and is scheduled to increase to $230,000 in September 2027 and $280,000 in September 2028. If the department decides to extend the lease, annual rent for the first extension year would be $330,000.

The school’s costs came out to about $1.6 million for temporary campus expenses, including rent, utilities and maintenance, according to the department’s January 2025 annual report on school repair and maintenance.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state share the costs of the lease for the facilities and maintenance of the temporary campus, with FEMA paying 90% and the state paying 10%. Horcajo said the federal funding of the temporary campus ends January 2029, one reason the School Facilities Authority is pushing to finish the new school that year.

Horcajo said the school is currently going through the environmental review stage, with studies on archaeological and cultural resources underway through 2027. Next will come the permitting stages, with construction projected from 2027 to 2029.

“We are in … the messy middle,” Horcajo said. “Not the beginning, when you’re all super stoked and happy, not the end, when the classrooms are open. We’re in the part where the hard details gotta get worked out.”

Lee said the authority is seeking bids from contractors a little differently than is usually done. Instead of asking for bids and then deciding what can be built based on the offers, the authority is putting together different campus designs and pricing and then asking for bids.

Lee said this “puts all the mind work ahead of the bid,” so that they can choose the components of the campus design they can afford within the state’s budget and then “hit the ground running and move into the construction phase” as soon as they get a contractor.  

“We need to maximize every single dollar,” Lee said.

Given that the school was estimated to cost $162 million in October but was given about $146 million, state Sen. Angus McKelvey said he plans to seek additional funding from the Legislature, which also will have to fund repairs for damage caused by hurricanes this summer on Hawai‘i Island and Kaua‘i.

“Hopefully, we’ll be able to garner some extra support from our colleagues and others to be able to close the gap,” he said.

McKelvey said “considering how far behind the eight-ball” the school rebuild is, 2029 is a “realistic timeline,” especially given the challenges of costs and supply chain issues at the global level. He likes the new location because it’s close to facilities like the skate park, pool and the Boys and Girls Club of Maui. 

“It’s important for this community to see that the school that they lost in the fire is going to be recreated for future generations,” he said.

Meanwhile, at the Kapalua campus, things are “going as well as can be hoped, given that it’s a temporary site,” said Principal Michael McCloskey. However, he added that it “doesn’t have the same feel of a true elementary school campus” because each classroom is isolated to its own trailer. 

“The kids are very resilient, our teachers are resilient,” he said. “Everybody is working very hard to continue restoring the sense of normalcy as much as can be.”

The temporary campus allowed them to stay in West Maui, but it’s still about a 15-minute drive from the heart of Lahaina town where the other schools are, and even farther away for the teachers and students who are still displaced and living on the other side of the island.

Inside the classrooms, the temporary structures are starting to show some wear. Cherry said every room has four air conditioners that FEMA told them to keep within a certain temperature range to prevent the floors from warping. She said they’ve done that but have still seen some warping, and both teachers and kids have tripped over the uneven flooring. They also don’t have a permanent potable water supply and have to use five-gallon water jugs.

The Department of Education said via email last week that it is “working to finalize a maintenance services contract following the transition from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ previous arrangement.” In the meantime, department facilities staff “are coordinating with school and complex area staff to address maintenance needs and arrange services.”

McCloskey confirmed Tuesday that the needed repairs to the classrooms have been reported and are still pending. Despite the issues, he thinks the temporary structures will be sustainable for the next three years until the new school is built.

“They do require maintenance, they do require repair,” he said. “So if we have that in place, I believe, given the resilience and just the general attitude of our community, we’ll be fine for another three years.”

Cherry said that in general, the kids have adapted to the changes, considering that most of them were barely old enough to remember the fire three years ago. 

“I think they’re so happy to be back in our space that they just roll with the punches,” Cherry said. “I mean the little kids, they don’t know much different.”

For the teachers, it’s harder. They remember how beautiful the original campus was, with its sprawling monkeypod trees and ocean views. For field trips, they could walk down to the harbor where Cherry’s husband worked for Atlantis Submarines. 

“It was a unicorn,” Cherry said. “We’ll never have it again.”

Cherry, whose family just moved into their newly rebuilt home in Lahaina in the last weekend of August, said many teachers are still struggling with displacement. For 15 months while their home was under construction, she and her husband have lived in a trailer on their neighbor’s lot while their adult and teenage daughters stayed in a unit at Lahaina Shores that wasn’t big enough to fit all of them and their four dogs. 

Now that they’re finally together in Lahaina again, Cherry feels a sense of peace, and she has a much shorter commute than when they were living in Wailuku shortly after the fire. 

Cherry said teachers just want a plan and some stability moving forward. For a long time, they’ve felt like they were in the dark about the future plans for the school, sorting through conflicting rumors about costs and design.  

“We show up for the kids and we get told a different thing each time,” Cherry said. 

She’s worked there for 17 years and is thinking about her future retirement, but she’s not sure if the school will get done on time.

“Unless you lost everything, you don’t really understand how hard it is to not know what’s happening for your future,” Cherry said.

Horcajo pointed out that the School Facilities Authority only took over the project this summer and hopes to do more outreach so school staff and the community feel like they’re in the loop. Last week, he went to speak with the staff on campus for the first time.

McCloskey, a former Hawai‘i island education administrator who came to Kamehameha III Elementary School shortly after the fire, said everyone is eager to get to see the campus rebuilt.

“Of course, I would like a new school tomorrow,” McCloskey said. “However, that’s not the reality.”

He recognized that the new campus can’t truly replace the one on Front Street. 

“It will never be the school it once was,” he said. “But we just need to remember that however many phases this might take, we need to finish it completely so that we are able to repair what was lost.”