Over the past year, I have read many opinions from state lawmakers, HSTA representatives and educators detailing the steps that must be taken to ensure that Hawai'i retains its highly qualified teachers, the most popular being more money and support. As a highly qualified teacher from the Mainland starting my second and final year in Hawai'i, I thought I should speak up on one reason that I won't be staying in the Islands beyond my second year.

What I find problematic are the conditions in which my students and I are expected to work. My husband and I, like most new Mainland teachers, teach on the Leeward Coast. This seems to be an area that many lawmakers are happily unfamiliar with. Here's what they would see if I were to take them on a tour of the facilities that pass as centers of education.

We'll start in my classroom in 'Ewa Beach. This is a school that has no air-conditioning and in which the temperature regularly hovers around 90 degrees. Because the windows need to be open all day, I have a quarter-inch of red dirt that blows through daily, covering every surface in the room. The mix of sweat and dust is so pronounced that I can roll the dirt off my skin at the end of the day much like, I imagine, a construction worker can.

Of course, the windows lead to other problems as well. When there is a breeze, the students' papers blow all over the room. Large jets fly overhead everyday around 11 a.m., causing me to halt my lesson and wait for the deafening noise to pass.

Last Friday, the lawn mowers went by and created such a dust storm and cacophony that we were forced to close all of the windows, thus exacerbating the heat problem.

My mother came to see my room and said, "I can't believe this is a school in the United States." I had to agree. Being covered in dirt, while sweating away in a loud, sultry room, has a very negative impact on learning and teaching.

The tour continues farther up the coast to Wai'anae Intermediate, long ranked the worst school in Hawai'i. After a look at one classroom, one might conclude that it is not the teachers or community that are to blame for low achievement, but the crumbling infrastructure.

After walking past the graffiti, one enters the room where my husband teaches and sees old, scratched chalkboards and myriad broken tables and chairs discarded in the corners. Wood is splintering off the cabinets, and the shelves are held, not with brackets, but with bent nails.

There is a cooling system of sorts in the room, but it is regularly broken. Last week, the thermostat read 94 degrees. While the school has been given the OK for improvements, bureaucratic entanglements seem to be slowing down the projects.

The message that these buildings send to the students and teachers are that these students don't matter. It is incomprehensible how a state that collects $4 billion in taxes annually (Department of Taxation State of Hawai'i Annual Report 2003-2004) can only spare $118,000 (.003 percent of the annual collected taxes) on the maintenance and repair of buildings that hinder, rather than inspire, learning.

Until lawmakers decide to invest in the infrastructure of their education system, highly qualified teachers will continue to make Hawai'i a migratory stopover in which they gain the experience of their first two years of teaching, and then fly off, taking their credentials, degrees and certifications with them.

Heather Harris is a public school teacher and 'Ewa Beach resident. She wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.