“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)
