Q. How long are waiting lists for your and other early education programs?

A. We have long wait lists at all of our schools. If you want to put your child into a childcare center, you should at least enroll them a year before you want them to start. The economy's good. Everybody's working. It's just created this real demand for childcare, early education.

Q. Why don't you use the term preschool in the name of your school?

A. To me, preschool means before you go to school and it bothers me that people still equate it with baby-sitting and not education. Everybody knows that this is probably the most important stage of formal education, so we're not going to call it preschool anymore. We're going to call it first school. They say that four out of 10 children are not ready to go to kindergarten. It's ironic that about four out of 10 people don't graduate from high school. I'm not saying it's a direct correlation but it's kind of interesting. If we really focused our attention on the early years, we would really increase that graduation rate and the possibility for success in schools in general would increase if we focused on those early years. We really need to acknowledge that early education should be publicly funded. If we re-prioritized the spending in our state where we put more on the front end, it would save us a lot on the back end. Right now we're wasting so many resources trying to keep kids in school. If our kids are ready when they enter kindergarten, they won't be behind. If they start behind, studies show that they never catch up. So we need to get our public officials behind this.

Q. What made you decide to have elderly people interact with young children?

A. About eight or nine years ago we were designing the second phase of our Kapolei school and one of my board members was involved in an aging project. She suggested that we include an adult daycare center in the next phase. It promoted activities that are mutually beneficial for both age groups. I was researching the writings of Piaget, a psychologist who wrote about the stages of life. One of the conclusions he came to was that for the older adult to have completion on the life cycle, they needed to come in contact with young people again at the end of their life. We have so many really good emotional stories about the relationships between the children and the adults at our Kapolei school. We also do an intergenerational program here at this school in Kailua and have adopted it at all of the schools. We're trying to develop one-on-one relationships between the children and the adults. People have come from all over the world to see this model, especially in Japan where they have an aging population they're concerned about.

Q. What kind of presence do you have in the state?

A. We have five schools at the moment. One in Kailua, the original site, founded in 1971. We have one downtown, next to the state Capitol, which is the largest childcare center in the state, 264 kids. We're celebrating our 20th anniversary there. We have another school on the Big Island at the Mauna Lani Resort for about 18 years that was built to serve the employees of the Mauna Lani hotel. But for the last eight or nine years, it's been a community school with very few of the Mauna Lani employees using it. We built one out at Kapolei 10 years ago. I believe it's the second largest childcare center. We just started our fifth location June 1 at Kapolei Elementary School. It's called a pre-plus program. We rent a building there from the state and we run an early-education program there for 3- and 4-year-olds who are going to transition into kindergarten at Kapolei Elementary.

Q. When is your next school coming on line?

A. 'Ewa Beach is under construction, and it's about half-way built. We were approached by Haseko because of a unilateral agreement they made with the city to have a childcare center in their development. They're donating an acre and a quarter of land to us, plus $200,000 in cash. We're mostly financing it with a direct loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That really surprises a lot of people. It's rural development money. Most parts of Hawai'i are eligible for USDA support. If you're outside the Hawai'i Kai to Red Hill corridor, almost every place in the state qualifies. We're going to open probably in December, January with 180 children.

Q. Do you have any other plans for new schools?

A. We do, on O'ahu and on the Big Island, but I can't talk about them. There are more opportunities than we can handle. The biggest issue for us is there are no teachers. The whole profession is affected by low wages. Those low wages have finally expressed themselves that there are no teachers now. I'm really not sure where they're going to come from. We're trying to develop conditions that will attract teachers. We have a grant proposal that would support the enrollment of high school students at Kapolei and McKinley high schools and put together a program with Honolulu Community College so they would get advanced placement college credit while still in high school. Once they graduate, we'll have the hook in them to become teachers and they'll graduate with college credit and be almost totally certified to be able to teach in a childcare center. We're also going overseas (in search of teachers). We just can't sit around and wait for things to happen.

Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com.