Thieves steal parts from Kihei Charter vans
School hopes to make repairs in time to bring more students on campus
Managing Editor
Thieves swiped crucial parts from four Kihei Charter School passenger vans, leaving the school with thousands of dollars in repairs and a shorthanded fleet to transport students, a school official said.
Gene Zarro, CEO of South Maui Learning Ohana, the nonprofit that founded Kihei Charter, said he discovered the problem two weeks ago when a local movie company asked to use some of the school’s vans for a shoot.
“Since our vans were not being fully utilized because of the pandemic, I said ‘sure,’ ” Zarro said Tuesday. “So I went outside to kind of make sure the batteries were charged . . . and when I turned the key, it sounded like the van exploded.
“If you can imagine a 15-passenger van, which is huge, with no exhaust system. I went through all of our vans and found that four of the vans were damaged by theft of the catalytic converter.”
South Maui Learning Ohana owns 12 vans capable of transporting 15 passengers. The vans are kept in the school parking lot, “and we have a lot of activity here, so it tells me it must’ve been in the middle of the night,” Zarro said. Kihei Charter uses the vans to drive kids to outdoor activities, sports and other programs.
“The’re very essential to our program,” Zarro said. “Fortunately we’re not using all the vans all the time because of the pandemic, but I need to get them ready by summer for the new school year. We’re expecting to go back to full face to face and hopefully a regular school year.”
Kihei Charter currently has 710 students and expects about 750 in the upcoming year that starts in August, Zarro said. Kindergarteners to 5th graders are learning face to face full time, while the middle and high school students spend two days in the classroom and two days learning virtually, with an alternating Wednesday. The middle school, for example, takes Wednesday in person one week and allows the high school to learn in person the next Wednesday.
With four vans damaged and four being used by the film company, Kihei Charter has four working vans left.
“Right now we’re OK, but we have a couple of faculty members that are taking some students out towards Waihee this week, and fortunately I have four vans that are still totally operational and that’ll be enough for this trip,” Zarro said. “So we’ve just gotta keep it at lower numbers going off campus.”
Zarro said there are only a few people on Maui that can do the kind of repairs the vans need. He expects the bill to be “over $1,000 per vehicle if I’m lucky.”
“In some cases, if not all, I haven’t been under every van, but it’s quite possible they damaged the exhaust system, meaning the muffler and the remaining pipes, in the process of stealing the catalytic converter,” he said.
He hopes the incident will help shed some light on the theft and sale of catalytic converters, pointing out that widespread copper wire thefts forced copper wire recycling and sales to require proper documentation. Stolen parts that likely brought the thieves a few hundred in quick cash will now cost the school much more.
“We have to get the money together and get the parts,” Zarro said. “It’s going to be some work. We never have enough money so it’s just coming from something else. Something just jumped to the top of the list and something on the top of the list just got pushed down. So we’ve just gotta make it work.”
Maui Police Department spokeswoman Alana Pico said Wednesday that a report was filed for the theft but that there are “no suspects, evidence or witnesses at this time.”
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