Kailua High School

Go Surf Riders! is that one word or two?

Rating: ³⁄₅
Date (s) visited:1/23 & ²⁴⁄₂₀₁₃
This review is for the Baseball & Soccer/​Football Fields.
Better than most.

KHS. All hail to the Blue and the White! What can I say?
Well, it was safer than Central Intermediate, I’ll say that much.
If memory serves me, I believe the bathroom in «D» building was where you would go if you wanted to get beat up. There was another bathroom where all the titas (rough girls who don’t take nothin’ from nobody) hung out. My friends and I would see them walking into the bathroom with their school lunches. Can you believe that? It seemed almost «normal» back then, but now I think it’s just gross! I used to smell pakalolo wafting out of that same bathroom. Guess it was the post-​luncheon smoke break. The safest bathroom for a skinny Haole boy like me was the one in the band building, so that was one advantage to being a band geek. Well, that and getting to see all the OIA football games that Kailua played in.
The highlight of my matriculation at this pinnacle of learning was in my junior year when there was a riot on campus. I think it all started when one family got into a beef with another family. Within about an hour, there were 17 police cars on campus, one student fainted, a policeman ended up with a bloody nose, and the meek little vice principal was hiding under his desk. In case there was ever any doubt about who was in charge on campus, the bullies or the administration, this day left little doubt in the minds of the entire student body. Ah, what a heady time it was… we even made the front page of The Honolulu Advertiser that day!
It wasn’t all bad. I had a wonderful psychology teacher there who was a retired Air Force colonel. He loved teaching, and he didn’t put up with any of the typical shenanigans that kids pulled with other, weaker teachers. I enjoyed playing in the marching band, and it won me a band scholarship to UH to help pay my first year’s tuition as an undergraduate. I am still in touch with my best friend from high school, who somehow managed to turn out okay, too. Neither of us ended up in jail! To this day, we talk about how we both wished (while we were enduring the travails of KHS) that our parents had been wealthy enough to send us to a school like Punahou or Iolani. We wondered what it would have been like to be pressured to study hard and get good grades, rather than risk getting pummelled for appearing at all intelligent. We wondered what it would be like to be able to use the bathroom without having to worry about getting «cracks» or «false cracks» by several people at once (no such thing as a fair one-​on-​one fight in our school!) For those who aren’t familiar with the local vernacular, a «crack» is a punch, and a «false crack» is a «sucker punch!»
But then again, maybe the experiences made us better in our chosen fields, where we have to get involved in resolving conflicts, arbitrations, mediations, counseling and consulting. We know how people can bully each other, and perhaps it gave us the compassion and empathy to help others. That’s what I like to believe anyway.
When I graduated from high school, I felt I had been released from jail. Even though UH Manoa was a neglected campus, with no obvious theme to its architechture, classes that were too large, an «anonymous» feeling that comes from it being a commuter campus, it was still such a relief to be expected to achieve. And It was pure heaven to be able to use any bathroom anywhere on campus, and not worry about getting beat up!