Leslie Lang writes:

You might remember that even when Richard met the Governor of the State of Hawai‘i, he wore short pants. So here’s something you don’t see every day:

Richard busted out his long pants recently to speak at a graduation for 169 high and middle school students considered “at risk.” The students were graduating from some pretty impressive summer programs funded by the Department of Human Services and the Hawai‘i National Guard.

Jenea Respicio is program director at the Paxen Group, the group that administers the summer programs. She says the students liked Richard; they thought he was funny.

“He started off saying, ‘I actually always wear shorts. I never, ever wear long pants. I met the governor and I still wore shorts. But I think this is really important and so I wore pants for you.’”

Jenea says Richard was invited to speak at the graduation because he was someone the kids could relate to—a local boy who, Jenea says, would be classified “high risk” if he were in school today. And one who definitely “made good.”

“He was a very effective speaker,” she told me, “and the kids could relate to him. It was nice for them to see a local boy who was just like them. It was nice for them to see that he made the decisions he made and did well.”

When Richard was that age, he admits, he was “drifting” and making some bad decisions. He went to college, but did poorly. He had more traffic tickets than he could pay. He got behind in payments on his Harley Davidson motorcycle and it was repossessed right off the street. “That was the end of my bike,” he says.

And he got into a lot of fights and at one point was charged with malicious injury.“I had all those things going on,” he says, “and at one point I asked myself, ‘Am I a crook? Am I a criminal?’” The thought distressed him.

He flunked out of college, got drafted and ended up in Vietnam, where he says he decided to make the best of the situation. He became an officer.

That was undoubtedly a good decision, which is what the summer programs concentrate on teaching. Jenea explains that in addition to teaching at-risk students about decisions, they also teach life and employability skills with courses called Exploring Careers, Effective Employee, Job Search and others. Among other things, “Life Skills” teaches them to write a check, balance a checkbook, fill out a job application and the hard facts about drugs, sex and smoking.

She explains they just present the facts. “We don’t tell students what they should or shouldn’t do and we don’t push an agenda. We just teach them all the facts and then it’s their life, their choice.”

And the summer program is a job. Students fill out time sheets and are paid $30 per day for six hours of work. Jenea says that’s about teaching responsibility. “If you don’t fill out the time sheet, you don’t get paid,” she says. “It’s your responsibility; it’s not my problem.”

Students learn how to keep a budget, write checks, and keep a check register. In a form of “reality programming” way more useful than what you see on TV, they learn, through a simulation exercise, about the real world. They are assigned minimum-wage “jobs,” and checkbooks, and every month the instructor “collects” rent (based on real prices from the local paper) and real-world amount payments for electricity, water and telephone.

She explains what always happens. “At the end of the month, we ask ‘How much do you have in your check register?’ They say, ‘I’m minus $247.’ We say, ‘I thought you said you were going to drive a Lexus when you got out of school?’ We say, ‘This is what your parents go through every month paying bills.’”

Then, she says, they present information on how much someone with a college education makes. “We don’t tell them to go to college,” she says. “We just give them the facts so they can decide what they want to do.”

At the June 29th graduation, the Kaua‘i Hilton’s chef flew in with his staff and they volunteered their time to prepare lu‘au food for the 700 graduates, family members and friends.

The graduation ceremony speakers (seated from left to right) were General Ishikawa, deputy adjutant general of the Hawai‘i National Guard; Richard Ha; Tim Iida, The Paxen Group’s program manager for the Big Island, and Colonel Wayne Kanemoto, retired Hawai‘i National Guard.

Richard says he made two main points in his talk. He passed on some important wisdom he learned as a kid, sitting at the table with his dad. “He always said, ‘Not no can, can!’ He’d pound the table and all the dishes would jump. I needed to say that, just that way, in pidgin English,” he explains.

“The second thing is that it’s a good thing to take care of each other, and treat everybody well,” he says. “That’s what I learned in Vietnam. Leaving anybody behind is not an option. Taking care of each other. That’s a good thing and I use that in my business.”

He also used it that night at the graduation, when he stood up there in his long pants and talked to a group of kids whose futures could go either way.

He says he really relates to kids not having any direction and just drifting along. “Myself, having found direction, I ran with it,” he says. “So I felt like I had something to share.”