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April 7, 2023 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Coffee Schedule

“You know, when you in the seventh grade like that, to carry one bag of coffee was quite a chore. And load three bags on a donkey and come up the trail. When it rain, the donkey would slip on the trail, fall. Had to unload the coffee, get the donkey up, load it again. I know, many times, I used to cry.” (Minoru Inaba)

As early as 1684, a grammar school founded in Massachusetts required 12 months of education. In 1841, Boston schools operated for 244 days while Philadelphia implemented a 251-day calendar.

In the beginning of the nineteenth century, large cities commonly had long school years, ranging from 251 to 260 days. During this time, many of these rural schools were only open about 6 months out of the year.  (Pedersen)

The origin for the traditional school calendar based purely on agrarian needs was not entirely accurate. In the 19th century districts organized their calendars around the needs of the community.

For example, some special provisions were made for vacations during September and October for communities with large fall harvests. Prior to 1890, students in major urban areas were in school for 11 months a year. But by 1900, the more popular 180 day, 9-month calendar had been firmly established. (Pedersen)

In the days before air conditioning, schools and entire cities could be sweltering places during the hot summer months. Wealthy and eventually middle-class urbanites also usually made plans to flee the city’s heat, making those months the logical time in cities to suspend school.

By the late 19th century, school reformers started pushing for standardization of the school calendar across urban and rural areas. So a compromise was struck that created the modern school calendar.  (PBS)

In Kona, the harvest of coffee used to set the school calendar.  “(B)ecause coffee was the basic industry in those days, much of the land was planted in coffee, of course. As of now, much of the land has been abandoned. But in those days, coffee was the basic industry in Kona.”

“(T)here was no other industry in Kona except coffee farming, and the sugar plantation, for a while. And of course, ranching, they had from way back. There was no tourism. No other businesses except coffee farming in Kona. … Most of the families were farmers. … coffee farmers.” (Minoru Inaba)

“As early as 1916 a ‘coffee vacation’ of three weeks in each November was an established institution in central Kona, where 95 per cent of Hawaii’s coffee industry is located.”

“It continued up to 1924, when the ‘vacation’ became optional – each school deciding when and how many weeks the vacation may be held each autumn.” (Inouye)

Then, in 1931, “A special vacation of three weeks for all schools in Kona has been sanctioned by the department of public instruction … The length of the vacation was a compromise between four or five weeks wanted by the (coffee) planters, and two weeks favored by most school principals.” (Hawaii Tribune Herald, Sep 23, 1931)

That, apparently, wasn’t good enough to address the needs of families of Konawaena – a couple weeks later it was announced, “Members of the Kona-waena Parent-Teacher association gave their unanimous approval at a meeting yesterday …”

“… to the plan to change the Kona-waena school year from September to June to December to September, allowing school children to assist in the coffee harvest during the months of September, October, and November.”

“The action was taken to eliminate the so-called ‘coffee vacation’ which makes it necessary for students to make up the time lost by attending school during the Thanksgiving holiday period and for five Saturdays after the first of February.”

“Much opposition had developed to the coffee vacation and the new proposal was suggested as a means of adapting the school year to the needs of industry in the Kona district.” (Hawaii Tribune Herald, Nov 23. 1931)

The Star Bulletin announced “Change in Vacation Time at Kona-Waena … With the approval of the new vacation schedule for the Kona-waena high school and grammar school in Kona by the West Hawaii commissioners, the annual vacation will be shifted from summer to winter.” (SB, Feb 13, 1932)

“)B)ecause of the need of the farmers to have their children help them on the farms, the coffee schedule was established. And the coffee schedule ran from … August, September, October, November – those three months – was the regular vacation – coffee vacation. This is the time when it was coffee season, you see?” (Minoru Inaba)

“(T)he summer vacation was really a fall vacation and started around the 16th of August and went through to about the 16th of November. So, that took most of the football season. The community associations didn’t get into football, because that would have only hurt the reason for the schedule as it was.”

“It would take kids away from picking coffee and helping their families. I think eventually, though, these kids found other things to do – possibly (because of) family transportation. Kids found other things to do a lot better than picking coffee.” (Sherwood Greenwell)

“You see, how they got that, you have to have the school kids pick coffee, eh? That’s the only way they can help the parents, by picking coffee. So, if you stay home from school, you lose that much education. I guess they entered a resolution or whatever you call it. Anyway, they got their school to change the time … that’s when you’re picking coffee.”

“We [normally] go back September. … the peak season is right when the school go back. So, they change it so that they have their Kona schedule on a coffee harvest time. Well, it worked out all right like that.” (Willie Thompson)

“(I)n the earlier days, on off season, the time before harvesting and after trimming, there weren’t job opportunities for the farmers. There was a criticism – probably doesn’t hold as much today because there’re not as many schoolteachers that are in the coffee business – but a lot of the schoolteachers that came back here, came back here because they had coffee farms – their

families had coffee farms.”

“Well, the coffee schedule really ended because the families could no longer get the kids to come back and spend the time on the farms to pick coffee, which the coffee schedule was supposed to take care of.”

“But those teachers that had coffee farms were more concerned about their coffee operations really than they were on their teaching. The teaching gave them the security of a steady income, while the coffee income was what they were really concerned about.” (Sherwood Greenwell)

“There were probably five or six years of where there was a question, (should) the coffee schedule be continued or (should) they give it up?  This became quite a hassle. It was kept, I think, longer than it was practical.”

“Probably for one reason more than anything else, and that was that a lot of the farmers felt that it was a concession that they had somehow gotten that was very important to them. Not that it was that worthwhile to them, but it was a concession that government had given them and they wanted it sort of there, even though it wasn’t working out as well as it should.”

“So, I think that probably extended the [time].  And it also – you got a feeling from the attitude of some people that if you were for going back to the regular schedule, that you were an enemy to coffee.”

“This was a feeling, I think, that a lot of people had who would like to have seen the thing [coffee schedule] dropped. It took some time and some guts for most of the people to overcome that feeling. So, I think it did continue longer than it should have.”

“I think it would have been better for the kids and everybody that it would be over with sooner. Kids going into college off the Kona schedule, college almost had started before they graduated, and I don’t think it helped that type of education – you know, ongoing education – for the kids.”  (Sherwood Greenwell)

Kona was not the only place with crop-based vacations … “(O)ne year, we were cutting back across the states, and there was a kid in Idaho fishing at a stream where we were fishing. We asked him how come he wasn’t in school. He said, ‘oh, spud vacation’. What they did was, school was let out at the height of the potato harvesting season for two weeks.”

“Something like that probably would have been a better way of doing it. Going on the regular schedule and then just having a vacation tied right into the harvesting period.” (Sherwood Greenwell)

“Then, the coffee kind of faded out. All the new teachers, they didn’t like teaching when all the other teachers have a rest, and they working. Then, they changed back to the regular. Then, the weather kind of changed too. Not much coffee. The season kind of different, too. So, that’s how they got the schools like that … about in the ’60s, they changed back to the regular schedule.” (Willie Thompson)

“I think, at the beginning, there was a real reason for it and I think it worked out very well. I think it strengthened the ties within the family where they all were working together for something.”

“I know it’s been said at times, if you had someone applying for a job that came from Kona, he was a good worker. He had good loyalty and he was a good worker. I think that all comes from that period where everybody in the family worked hard together.” (Sherwood Greenwell)

In 1932, the school coffee schedule was inaugurated. There are 1,077 coffee farms in Kona, covering 5,498 acres. The farms ranged in size from 3 to 30 acres, with the average size being 5 acres.

Kona students picked a total of 25,320 bags during their “summer” vacation period between October and December in 1932.  (Social History of Kona)

On June 20, 1968, “The Kona coffee schedule of November – to – August year for Kona schools was ended … in a complicated series of actions by the State Board of Education.  The board thus ended a 36-year-old unique tradition devised to free youngsters to pick coffee during the harvest months of September and October.”

A transition year in 1968-69 was “a temporary measure to provide time to plan for implementing an entirely new system in the 1969-70 school year.”  (SB, June 21, 1968)

© 2022 Ho‘okuleana LLC

Filed Under: Schools Tagged With: Hawaii, Kona, Kona Coffee, Konawaena High, Coffee Schedule, Vacation

June 8, 2014 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Summertime

In a lot of respects, with or without kids, school vacation schedules seem to set how we operate our lives.

Until the middle of the 19th century, Americans used the word vacation the way the English do, the time when teachers and students vacate the school premises and go off on their own.  (Siegel; NPR)

Summer … Memorial Day to Labor Day, right?  Well, maybe before, but why?

A first thought is the historic reason for the season of summer vacations is so kids can go work on the family farm.  There are a number of reasons summer vacation came about, but the farming calendar isn’t one of them.

There used to be two basic school schedules – one for urban areas and the other for rural communities.

In the past, urban schools ran year-round. For example, in 1842 New York City schools were in class for 248 days. Rural schools took the spring off to plant, and the autumn off to harvest. (The summer actually isn’t the busiest time in agriculture.)

Short school years with long vacations are not the norm in Europe, Asia, or South America. Children in most industrialized countries go to school more days per year and more hours per day than in America.

Rural schools typically had two terms: a winter term and a summer one, with spring and fall available for children to help with planting and harvesting. The school terms in rural schools were relatively short: 2-3 months each.  (Taylor)

In addition, in rural areas, the summer term was considered “weak.” The summer term in rural neighborhoods tended to be taught by young girls in their mid- to late-teens. On the other hand, schoolmasters, generally older males, taught the winter terms. Because of this, the summer terms were seen as academically weaker.  (Lieszkovszky; NPR)

It’s hot in the summer. The school buildings of the 19th-century weren’t air-conditioned. Heat during the summer months would often become unbearable.    (Lieszkovszky; NPR)

In 1841, Boston schools operated for 244-days while Philadelphia implemented a 251-day calendar. In the beginning of the 19th-century, large cities commonly had long school years, ranging from 251 to 260 days.  During this time, many of these rural schools were only open about 6-months out of the year.  (Pedersen)

In the 1840s, however, educational reformers like Horace Mann moved to merge the two calendars out of concern that rural schooling was insufficient and then-current medical theory and concerns over student health in the urban setting.

“(A) most pernicious influence on character and habits … not infrequently is health itself destroyed by over-stimulating the mind.”  (Mann)

This concern over health seemed to have two parts.  As noted above, there was the concern that over-study would lead to ill-health, both mental and physical; the other concern was that schoolhouses were unhealthy in the summer (heat, ventilation, etc.)  (Taylor)

Attendance became another problem.  The city elite could afford to periodically leave town for cooler climates.  School officials, battling absenteeism, saw little advantage in opening schools on summer days or on holidays when many students wouldn’t show up. Pressure to standardize the school calendar across cities often led campuses to “the lowest common denominator” – less school.    (Mathews; LA Times)

In the second half of the 19th-century, school reformers who wanted to standardize the school year found themselves wanting to lengthen the rural school year and to shorten the urban school year, ultimately ending up by the early 20th-century with the modern school year of about 180 days.  (Taylor)

Summer emerged as the obvious time for a break: it offered a break for teachers, generally fit with the farming needs and alleviated physicians’ concerns that packing students into sweltering classrooms that would promote the spread of disease.  (Time)

While it’s clear historically that 3-month layoff from school was not based on farming needs – for most of the country – in Hawaiʻi there was a farm-based reason for the break from studies, at least from 1932 to 1969.

It happened in Kona.

By the 1890s, the large Kona coffee plantations were broken into smaller (5+/- acres) family farms.  By 1915, tenant farmers, largely of Japanese descent, were cultivating most of the coffee. Many hours were spent cleaning and weeding the land, pruning the trees, harvesting the crop, pulping the berries and drying them for the mills.

These were truly family farms.  “At that time, we used to work until dark. You see, no matter how young you were, you have to work. Before going to school, we pick one basket of coffee, then go to school. We come home from school and we pick another basket.” (Tsuruyo Kimura; hawaii-edu)

Konawaena was the regional school; it was first established as an elementary school, about 1875.  By 1917, they were pushing to get a Kona high school (at the time, Hilo High, established in 1905, was the only high school on the island.)

In 1920, the Territory acquired land for a new school and in 1921, the new Konawaena accommodated students up to the 9th-grade; classes through the senior year were added by the 1924-25 school year.

Konawaena means “the Center of Kona,” and it lived up to its name.  “Everything possible has been done to make the community feel that the school belongs to them. A Kona Baseball League has been organized and all league games are played on the school diamond” (Crawford, 1933; HABS)

The Kona area was observed as being “different socially from the rest of the Islands” (Crawford, 1933; HABS.)  Coffee farming was the main reason for the difference. This labor-intensive crop thrived best in the steep lava slopes of the Kona districts.

“The labor problem is one that will have to be seriously considered.  As coffee culture increases, the need of a greater supply of labor will be strongly felt, particularly at picking time. A large force is then needed for three or four months, after which, if coffee alone is cultivated, there is need only of a small part of the force required for picking.”  (Thrum)

These labor and  land factors meant a non-industrial, small-farm type of agriculture, very different from the industrial trends in the growing sugar and pineapple plantations that developed in other areas of the Islands.

The school went beyond recreational activities to accommodate the surrounding community.

In 1932, the school’s ‘summer’ vacation was shifted from the traditional Memorial Day to Labor Day (June-July-August) to August-September-October, “to meet the needs of the community, whose chief crop is coffee and most of which ripens during the fall months.” (Ka Wena o Kona 1936; HABS)

In 1935, the legislature recognized the ‘Konawaena Coffee Vacation Plan’ and passed legislation such that “The teachers of the Kona District … shall be paid, under such conditions as the Department of Public Instruction (now DOE) may require, their monthly accruing salaries during the months of September and October of each year during which such plan is in operation.”    (Session Laws, 1935)

This “coffee harvest” school schedule and the “coffee vacation” lasted until 1969 (Honolulu Star Bulletin 1969; HABS.)

And now, in Hawaiʻi and across the country, there are varying arrangements for school schedules and vacations.  Some areas have lost the 3-month layover; but most are trending with a total 180 to 200-days of instruction, with various schedules in arranging the breaks.

The image shows, reportedly, the old Konawaena School and coffee (Kona Historical.)  In addition, I have added other images in a folder of like name in the Photos section on my Facebook and Google+ pages.

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© 2014 Hoʻokuleana LLC

Filed Under: General, Place Names, Economy Tagged With: Hawaii, Hawaii Island, Kona, Kona Coffee, Coffee, Hilo High, Konawaena High

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