Hawaii school safety

Hawaii runs its public schools as one statewide system. On most of our state pages, the useful comparison is district against district — dozens of them, each filing its own records. Here there is a single school district, the Hawaii Department of Education, and it is the one district in the state with enough scored schools to rank. So the question this page answers is not which district keeps better records. It is which individual schools filed records we can stand behind.

For the 2021-22 Civil Rights Data Collection, we have 296 Hawaii schools. We publish a safety score for 206 of them. For the others, you will see a grade and our reasoning but no score. That is the method working as designed: we only put a number on schools whose reporting we believe.

What the grades tell you, and what they don't

Thirty-eight Hawaii schools — 12.8% of the state — land in our doubtful range, a D or an E. The national share is 11.3%. Hawaii sits a little above that line, and it is worth being careful about what the difference is. Our comparison is not adjusted by state. When one state's share runs higher than another's, that reflects how schools in that state fill out federal forms, not how safe children are there.

A D or an E means schools of the same size teaching the same grades normally report several incidents, or ten or more, and this school reported almost none. We cannot tell you whether the incidents didn't happen or the reporting didn't. A C means a school reported close to nothing but is small enough that a true zero is ordinary — not proof of safety, but not implausible either. None of these grades says a school is dangerous. They describe records.

Across its scored schools, the Hawaii Department of Education ranks safer than 25% of ranked U.S. districts. Use the school list below to see where your own school falls, and treat a missing score as an open question worth asking the school directly.

Safest ranked cities in Hawaii

Percentile is against all ranked U.S. cities (higher = safer). Only cities with ≥5 trustworthy-data schools are ranked. Home value is Zillow's ZHVI.

Safest ranked districts

Every Hawaii city with schools

Every Hawaii school district