DOE tells Hawaii charter schools to figure out their own meal arrangements

Nov. 11—If Earl’s Snack Shop hadn’t stepped in at the 11th hour, Kanu o ka Aina Public Charter School in Hawaii might not have been able to feed its neediest students this school year.

Earlier this year, Taffi Wise, Kanu o ka Aina’s business manager, was notified that the school could no longer get its meals from the Hawaii Department of Education.

The DOE was trying to address a scathing internal audit, published a few months earlier, that found that the department was wasting millions of dollars on its food services program, whose budget last year was about $92 million.