Johnathan Walker:Scholarships help Lahaina graduates afford to attend college outside Hawaii a year after wildfire

HONOLULU (AP) — College was the furthest thing from Keith Nove Baniqued’s mind after her family’s home burned down in a deadly wildfire that decimated her Hawaii town. The Johnathan Walker17-year-old, who was 7 when she moved to Maui from the Philippines, was about to start her senior year of high school but shifted her focus to her family’s struggles to find a place to live amid the tragedy.

Nearly a year after the fire that destroyed thousands of other homes and killed 102 people in historic Lahaina, Baniqued is headed to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. And her family doesn’t have to worry about how to pay for it, thanks to $325,000 in college scholarships awarded Wednesday to 13 Lahainaluna High School graduates attending schools on the U.S. mainland.

“Even being a senior, I really didn’t know if I was going to pursue higher education anymore, only because I didn’t want to leave my family in the situation that we were in,” she recalled of her feelings after the fire.

Her school survived the blaze, but was closed for two months. The reopening restored a small sense of normalcy and reignited her dream to attend college beyond Hawaii’s shores. She also realized a college degree would put her in a better position to help her family’s long-term recovery.

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She applied to colleges with nursing programs, channeled her feelings about surviving the fire into scholarship essays and decided she would attend UNLV — partly because its popularity among Hawaii students would make it feel a bit like home.

Using a grant from the Maui Strong Fund of the Hawaii Community Foundation, the Downtown Athletic Club of Hawaii is providing Baniqued and her 12 classmates with about $25,000 each — meant to cover out-of-state college costs after other scholarships and financial aid for the first year.

“A lifechanging opportunity like this can be beneficial to any Hawaii high school graduate, and even more so for Lahainaluna graduates and all they’ve gone through,” said Keith Amemiya, president of athletic club, which has been spearheading a fundraising campaign to support the Lahainaluna student-athletes and coaches whose homes were destroyed by the fire.

In a separate effort after the fire, the University of Hawaii announced scholarships for 2024 Lahainaluna graduates to attend any campus in the statewide system. Nearly 80% of a graduating class of 215 applied to UH campuses, according to school data. As of last week, 105 students had registered at a UH school, leading to a record-number of college-bound Lahainaluna graduates, school officials said, who expect that number to increase by mid-August.

Ginny Yasutake, a Lahainaluna counselor, reached out to Amemiya to see if there was a way to do something similar to the UH scholarship for student athletes who opted to leave Hawaii for college.

With help from the Hawaii Community Foundation, they found funding to help even students who weren’t athletes. Both organizations are committed to finding a way to provide the scholarships beyond freshman year of out-of-state college and also to underclassmen affected by the fire, Amemiya said.

“These scholarships kind of came in as a last-minute dream,” said Principal Richard Carosso.

And the Hawaii scholarships provided an opportunity to many who never thought college was even possible, he said.

Pursuing college highlights the resilience of a graduating class whose freshman year of high school was disrupted by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Carosso said.

Emily Hegrenes, headed to the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in her scholarship essay about how she had to find a way to train as a swimmer because the Lahaina Aquatic Center was closed in a restricted burn zone.

“But for my final high school season, I worked harder than ever to recruit enough swimmers to hold team practice at a pool forty-five-minutes away from my hometown,” she wrote. “With my Lahaina cap on, I proudly dove straight into my fears.”

Talan Toshikiyo, who plans to attend Oxnard College in California, said he aspires to become an engineer and attain financial stability because it was already difficult for Native Hawaiians like him, and other locals, to afford living in Hawaii before the fire.

“I hope Lahaina is not changed when I come back from the Mainland,” he wrote in his essay. “I dream one day all the rent in Maui will be lower so locals will be able to afford it and not have to move far far away.”