Fledgling public charter school gets more than $1.5M boost from Chan Zuckerberg Kauaʻi Community Fund

A fledgling North Shore Kaua‘i public charter middle and high school is in its initial buildout and will welcome its first students next fall.

None of that would be possible without the remarkable network of partners Namahana School has built since 2015, when residents and members of the Kauaʻi North Shore Community Foundation circulated a petition that garnered 600-plus signatures to support the development of a public charter middle and high school.

Now that list of partners includes Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive officer of Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp, among other products and services. He is also building a luxury estate on Kaua‘i.

Chan and Zuckerberg, through the Chan Zuckerberg Kauaʻi Community Fund of the Hawai‘i Community Foundation, made a cash gift of $750,000 to Namahana School alongside a set of state-of-the-art mobile facilities valued at $800,000.

“This combined [$1.5 million] gift is especially impactful for us,” said Namahana Education Foundation Chief Development Officer Bridget Thorpe in an email to Kauaʻi Now. “It pushes Namahana School’s pre-opening fundraising total to $6 million, including $5.3 million toward a $10 million capital campaign to construct the middle school portion of the campus.”

While more common in the world of private school fundraising, those fundraising numbers are almost unheard of among Hawai‘i startup charter schools — many of which struggle to meet basic facility needs and often operate for years in tents, churches or other temporary structures.

Chan and Zuckerberg support a broad cross-section of Kaua‘i community organizations.

“We are impressed with the remarkable level of community support Namahana School has garnered over the years,” said Chan in a press release. “We are proud to contribute to this effort to give Kaua‘i’s North Shore the tuition-free, public middle and high school that its children and families deserve.”

The new school campus is being constructed on 11.3 acres of land it purchased outright last year in Kīlauea, across from the Kīlauea Post Office.

It will welcome its first cohort of students in grades 7 and 8 on Aug. 4, 2025.

North Shore families commute up to 3 hours a day, often by bus, to Kapa‘a or beyond. The trip is often compounded by rush hour traffic and road closures because of extreme weather or infrastructure repairs, and can greatly interfere with a student’s personal and academic well-being.

Many North Shore community members came together to support Namahana School because of those barriers.

“This gift is a powerful vote of confidence for our startup enterprise because it demonstrates that Namahana’s mission is compelling enough to resonate with philanthropists and visionaries at this scale,” said Namahana Education Foundation Executive Director Melanie Parker about Chan and Zuckerberg’s donations in the press release. “While we can’t move this project forward without the full support of our local community, we also believe that Namahana’s aspirations are global in reach.”

Parker added that because of Chan’s experience in education, she understands the complexity and responsibility of such an undertaking.

Chan is a pediatrician and co-founder and co-chief executive officer of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. She founded The Primary School in 2016 in East Palo Alto, Calif., for students in preschool through middle school.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative also has given more than 1,000 grants to educational initiatives throughout the nation since its launch in 2015, emphasizing research and tools that embrace the “whole child” approach — similar to Namahana’s central learning framework.

Namahana School Leader Kapua Chandler said the school’s unique learning experience was intentionally designed to engage the entire student to provide them with a complete and hands-on education, in the classroom and beyond.

“All educators share the desire to unlock the true potential of each child,” said Chandler in the press release. “When we stop to reflect on what makes that potential come alive, it’s the full range of experiences that they’re exposed to — beyond textbook learning inside classrooms, it is also the strength of their relationships to self, community and place.”