By Staff Reports
(HONOLULU) – Mayor Rick Blangiardi and Seagull Schools CEO Megan McCorriston announced Tuesday that the City and County of Honolulu has extended its lease on the Seagull Schools’ Early Education Center until late August 2023, allowing students and educators to finish the entire 2022-2023 school year in their current facility on the Frank F. Fasi Civic Center grounds.
The lease had previously been set to expire in February 2023. It is being extended to avoid unnecessary disruption to students and staff members during the school year, which ends on July 31, 2023.
“I distinctly remember both the thrills and struggles of parenting young children, and those memories are a constant reminder of how seriously we all should prioritize early childhood education,” said Mayor Rick Blangiardi. “Because of pressing safety issues related to the City’s parking garage, we can’t avoid displacing the school. But we can, and will, do everything possible to help them through that disruption, including working with our own employees to make room for Seagull Schools’ students on the Civic Center campus.”
The Early Education Center is a City-owned facility that is operated by Seagull Schools. Once the current lease expires, and as part of a multi-million dollar project to perform critical infrastructure repair work on the City’s Civic Center Municipal Parking Structure, the current school buildings – which sit on top of the parking structure – will need to be demolished.
The parking structure suffers from extensive water damage that has eaten away at the concrete, creating a safety hazard for both people and property. The City expects design work on the repairs to be completed this year and actual construction to take as long as three years to complete, once work on the project gets underway.
Following the conclusion of the 2022-2023 school year, the City is working to help relocate Seagull Schools and the students of the Early Education Center to an alternate site on the Civic Center campus.
As part of that effort, some City employees have been temporarily relocated from their offices at the Frank F. Fasi Municipal Building to office space at 711 Kapi‘olani Blvd., and employees who work in the Mission Memorial Building and the Municipal Reference Center are in the process of being relocated to the vacated space in the Fasi Municipal Building.
“Seagull Schools welcomes the news of our lease extension until August 26, 2023, which will allow our students to enjoy this coming school year starting in August at our current location without interruption to the program,” said Megan McCorriston, the CEO of Seagull Schools. “This will also allow us more time to work with the City and County on the relocation of our school to another site on the City’s downtown campus in 2023, which is making good progress.”
After repairs to the parking garage have been finished, the City and County of Honolulu intends to build a brand-new early childhood education facility where the existing school is currently located.