Maunaloa Elementary School sits in a small plantation town on the western end of Molokai, an island accessible only by small plane or ferry. The school is tiny. The community is remote. And in 2025, Maunaloa has a 2% chronic absenteeism rate, the second-lowest of any school in Hawaii, behind only Kanuikapono Public Charter School at 1%.

Three years ago, that rate was 63%.

A Recovery That Overshot the Baseline

Maunaloa's trajectory is the most dramatic individual school turnaround in Hawaii's data:

• 2019: 15% (pre-COVID)
• 2020: 10%
• 2021: 25%
• 2022: 63% (peak)
• 2023: 45%
• 2024: 7%
• 2025: 2%

The school did not merely recover to its pre-pandemic rate. It blew past it. At 2%, Maunaloa is 13 percentage points better than its own 2019 baseline of 15%. Whatever changed at this school did not just undo the pandemic's damage. It produced attendance outcomes far superior to anything the school had achieved before.

Among the Best in the State

In 2025, only nine schools in Hawaii have chronic rates below 6%, and a tenth (Mānoa Elementary) sits at exactly 6%. Maunaloa sits alongside schools that serve very different communities:

School	Rate
Kanuikapono PCS	1%
Maunaloa Elementary	2%
Momilani Elementary	3%
Nā Wai Ola PCS	3%
Myron B. Thompson Academy	4%
Lt. Col. Hickam Elementary	5%
Kaʻelepulu Elementary	5%
Niihau High & Elementary	5%
Kūlia Academy	5%
Mānoa Elementary	6%

Several of these are military-affiliated schools or schools in affluent neighborhoods. Maunaloa is neither. It is a rural school on an island with high poverty rates and limited services. Its presence on this list is an outlier.

Molokai's Other Schools Tell a Different Story

Maunaloa's recovery has no parallel on the rest of Molokai. The island's other schools remain well above pre-COVID levels:

School	2019	2022	2025
Maunaloa Elementary	15%	63%	2%
Kaunakakai Elementary	11%	63%	37%
Kualapu'u Charter	9%	57%	31%
Molokai Middle	11%	45%	30%
Molokai High	16%	49%	34%

Kaunakakai Elementary had the exact same 2022 peak as Maunaloa (63%) but has only recovered to 37%. The divergence is striking: two schools on the same island, with the same COVID disruption, ending up 35 percentage points apart.

Questions Worth Asking

Maunaloa's numbers raise an obvious question: what happened? A 61-point improvement from peak, ending 13 points below the pre-pandemic rate, in a remote community that has every structural disadvantage associated with chronic absenteeism. This does not happen by accident.

The small size of the school may be part of the explanation. In a community where every family knows every teacher, the social infrastructure for attendance may be fundamentally different than in a larger school. Changes in leadership, family engagement practices, or community partnerships could have outsized effects in a school with fewer than 100 students.

But it could also reflect demographic shifts: families leaving Molokai, enrollment changes that altered the composition of the student body, or data reporting factors unique to very small schools where a handful of students can move the percentage dramatically.

Whatever the cause, Maunaloa's 2% rate is real, verified, and remarkable. It is worth understanding how a school went from nearly two-thirds of its students chronically absent to nearly zero.

The Hawaii Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.

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