Two lawsuits filed against the Department of Education this summer allege the state has fallen short of its constitutional duty to provide families with access to Hawaiian language immersion schools.

In February, Harley Miner showed up to Waiau Elementary on the first day of kindergarten registration, only to find out the Pearl City school near her home had no space left for her son.

Miner planned to enroll her son in the elementary school’s Hawaiian language immersion program since the family speaks Hawaiian at home and he attended an immersion preschool. But Oʻahu has few public schools that offer Hawaiian immersion programs starting in kindergarten, and Miner later learned that families had lined up at 4 a.m. on registration day to enroll their kids at Waiau.

“I didn’t do all of this

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