2025 has challenged public and private funders to speed up the facilities and needed workforce to teach 3-4-year-olds in our universally accessible preschools across the state. The initial joy in seeing the legislature respond generously to the cry for physical facilities for the 50% of children unable to access quality preschools has given way to, in 2025, the bleak reality of an all-too-small teaching workforce. The facilities, funded in part by the last of the flood of federal COVID-19 larges in 2021-2022, have been followed by more intractable problems related to insufficient compensation, a lack of university and community college faculty to teach the all-too-small numbers of new educators, so common in the continental US, has plagued Hawaii.
The Hawaii State Legislature has mandated that Hawaii complete its implementation of public preschools by 2032. During that time, we must create incentives and new ways of attracting an accomplished workforce to a field where the sector has carried the overwhelming number of schools for decades and must persist as the source of much of our state’s curricular diversity. Given the century-old state prohibition against using public funds to fund private preschools, the funding of private preschools, dependent primarily on private philanthropy and tuition and fees, was never certain. While that uncertainty of funding continued through 2025, the public faced the challenge of maintaining the private preschools while establishing two systems that are or can be complementary.
The Castle Foundation, a traditional funder of teacher education and high-quality professional development for existing teachers, became perhaps the most essential programmatic effort in 2025. Able partners in higher education included the University of Hawaii system, with community colleges, four-year colleges, and graduate schools receiving an annual support. In addition, the private and often innovative Chaminade University, a Marianist university, continued to receive a yearly grant to support undergraduate and graduate students in 2025. The traditional focus on scholarships continued but was augmented by substantial additional funds for licensure, CDAs, continuing education, and professional development. Wherever possible, we co-funded with our excellent partners, Kamehameha Schools and the Hawaii Community Foundation.
The emerging sense is that the Castle Foundation while supporting scholarships and the University of Hawaii stipend program we helped to initiative in 2022-2023, may mean we front-load more funding for two-year community colleges where entry is most accessible and where course completion for students working multiple jobs to pay tuition is more feasible. Obtaining teaching licensure without sacrificing needed quality might best be done through flexible alternative education, supplemented by additional funds for continuing educational and professional development, which may be part of the solution. Our trustees want all preschool teachers to obtain a four-year academic degree but realize we may need intermediate steps initially. The key to success is funding ongoing and new professional development through intensive cohort work and individual online CDAs and PD. Obtaining licensure to speed teachers into the classroom is consistent with the plans of the Governor and LTG’s initiatives in our field.
In addition, to strengthen the teaching skills of our early education workforce, we have funded a second year of expanded CDA’s and are likely to do so in 2026. PATCH is our provider in this endeavor and our co-funder is Kamehameha Schools.
On an continuing basis, we seek and support a diversity professional development opportunities for our educational sector. In 2025, we supported continuing teacher and preschooler arts education on Oahu and Maui, social and emotional teaching strategies, science and math teacher education for all islands, and individual schools – located professional development.
Just as crucial to the Castle Foundation is ensuring our invaluable and experienced private sector continues to receive funds to obtain accreditation with NAEYC, HAIS, NECPA or WASC or to maintain it, funds for capital expansion and minor capital repairs, funds for teacher training, funds for curricular innovation and evaluation, improvement to k-readiness, etc. Working with preschool administrators, teachers, and advocates state-wide, we crafted requests for proposals that allowed us to target grants and speed up the application process. We continue to emphasize grants for accredited preschools with the greatest chance for kindergarten readiness. However, we also assist preschools seeking new accreditation for the first time. In 2025, we provided $300,000 in low-income tuition assistance; since 2000, we have provided over $3,000,000 to encourage attendance in private preschools. Moreover, our partnership with the Hawaii Association of Independent Schools has expanded our professional development opportunities throughout the state.
2025 brings back memories of the 1940s when the Castle Foundation helped develop the Territorial public kindergartens. This decade-long effort led to a sizeable public kindergarten system available to every state citizen. It complements the continuing private kindergarten system, which provides the needed diversity and pluralism for our early education offerings.
As one of America’s oldest foundations, we often learn from the historical work to develop public kindergartens which complemented and competed with private kindergartens in the 1940’s and beyond and today’s effort to support a similar role for public preschools which compete with private preschools. The goal of both efforts was and is to ensure every child has access to high quality early education.
I am especially mindful of the Castle Foundation-funded initiative at Chaminade University. This initiative brings DHS and early education professionals to plan for a high-quality training program for teachers on toddlers (two-year-olds). Under the direction of Dr. Elizabeth Park, the Castle Foundation has provided program planning funds and ample scholarship funds to encourage initial enrollment. The community’s need for certified teachers of toddlers is substantial and increasing rapidly as many preschools in Hawaii are considering adding toddler programs to existing preschools. Our Foundation will follow Dr. Park’s planning team with great interest and ensure that funding is prioritized for community education and developmentally appropriate efforts.
2025 brings leadership changes that have been carefully planned for many months. My cousin Dr. Kitt Baldwin, a pulmonologist in Seattle, Washington, will retire in 2026. He has accepted the critical position of Foundation president starting January 1, 2025. He will work closely with me to ensure that the Foundation’s 19th-century charter continues to thrive in its service to Hawaii. Dr. Baldwin is a descendant of the famous medical missionary Dr. Dwight Baldwin of Maui. Dwight Baldwin is renowned for his substantial medical missionary work, the many lives he saved from smallpox in the 1853 pandemic, and how much he did to establish Western medical practices in the early Hawaiian Kingdom. Our new president is the grandson of businessman and developer Harold K.L. Castle and a great-great grandson of the philanthropists Samuel N. and Mary Tenney Castle. Our trustees are grateful for his continuing commitment and his more significant involvement in the many projects and programs that the Foundation invests in. In 2025, we will also welcome a new trustee to our ranks. Dr. Theresa Lock is a well-respected researcher, educator, and professor at the University of Hawaii’s College of Education. Dr. Lock has worked on policy and procedures related to preschool workforce development and has been an influential expert on everything from Head Start and private preschools to the rapidly developing universal access preschool system. Dr. Lock will add the always-needed dimension of the theoretician combined with a proven innovator and practitioner.
Finally, due to changes in our national leadership, unprecedented federal debt, and a compliant Congress, America is experiencing significant changes in the number and amount of federal grants to human services and education. Tragically, it appears that Native Hawaiian-focused early education, an area of substantial charitable investment for the Castle Foundation, will receive fewer federal grants. Hawaii will likely suffer a downturn in the revenue-generating tourism industry and rising inflation from the new tariff rates on imported goods. Differences with China over trade policies will especially impact Hawaii in 2025-2026. Governor Josh Green has urged all foundations to increase funding to ease the financial gaps experienced by nonprofit organizations throughout the state. For example, the reduction of Medicaid and SNAP benefits will impact low-income families and their children especially hard. As a 19th-century foundation, our trustees have the difficult challenge of honoring our early education charter as well as our continuing support of infant toddler programs. While managing our endowment, we must focus on universal, high-quality early education and fundamental social well-being; finding a reasonable balance between early education and easing the pain of Hawaii’s human services organizations will not be easy. This crisis management may include fewer investments in early education, more advocacy for children at the local and national levels, and greater charitable investments in basic services for the community. This means little or no expansion of our current investments in individual public and private preschools and more focus on system-building and workforce development for the sector. Given limited resources, national economic conditions will likely define what is still possible for the community.
My trustees join me in thanking our nonprofit partners for boosting children and families. That mission will never change, even as economic circumstances fluctuate.
With warm aloha,
Alfred L. Castle
Managing Trustee
June 1, 2025