One in every 13 Hawaiʻi public high school freshmen repeated ninth grade during the 2024-2025 school year, according to the state education department, a rate that places Hawaiʻi among the states holding back the highest share of incoming high schoolers in the country. On Hawaiʻi Island, the numbers run even steeper: Pāhoa High and Intermediate School posted a 12% ninth-grade retention rate that year, while nearby Keaʻau High School sits around 6%.
The figures come from an analysis detailed by Honolulu Civil Beat, produced in partnership with Big Local News and The Hechinger Report. Big Local News senior data journalist Eric Sagara conducted the data analysis, which found that Hawaiʻi public high schools retained roughly 1 in 10 freshmen in the 2021-2022 school year — more than double the national freshman retention rate that year. Pāhoa High, located in the rural Puna District, held back nearly a quarter of its freshman class that same year.
The retention crunch traces back to how Hawaiʻi structures promotion. Unlike more than two dozen states that require or allow schools to retain third-graders who aren't proficient in reading, Hawaiʻi has no law mandating early retention, and elementary and middle schoolers here repeat grades at a rate below 1% overall. That means academic gaps can quietly accumulate for years before ninth grade, when credit-based promotion rules suddenly force the issue. Mississippi and Florida, by contrast, retain students as early as kindergarten through third grade.
A Freshman Year Derailed by Attendance
Josiah Ulukita is one of the students who needed to repeat ninth grade. He missed roughly half of his freshman year because of poor attendance and failed both freshman English and social studies, according to the Civil Beat report. He's now on track to graduate in 2028.
To advance to 10th grade, Keaʻau High requires freshmen to earn five credits, part of the broader path toward the 24 credits — spanning English, social studies, math, science, world language or fine arts, PE, health, and a personal transition plan — that Hawaiʻi high schoolers need to graduate under state Board of Education Policy 4540. Statewide, Hawaiʻi high school freshmen drop out at a rate of roughly 12% within four years, and students who fail two or more ninth-grade classes complete high school within five years at only a 57% rate, compared with an 89% statewide average for five-year completion.
What The Research Says About Holding Kids Back
Umut Ozek, whose research on grade retention was cited in the Civil Beat report, said retention can work in earlier grades when it's paired with educational supports, but that holding older students back can negatively affect high school completion and college enrollment. He said grade retention in later grades — especially high school — is not a good idea, and that retention in middle and high school could actively harm students. Francisco Martorell, also cited in the report, said the effect of repeating ninth grade on student achievement is difficult to determine.
That tension shows up in the state's own numbers. Hawaiʻi P-20 Partnerships for Education has found that students who scored below standards on eighth-grade reading and math tests were less likely to pass all their ninth-grade courses and complete high school within five years — evidence that the freshman-year cliff is often set up years earlier, even without formal retention along the way.
Big Island Schools Build Their Own Fixes
Keaʻau High School runs a three-week summer transition program for incoming freshmen that has drawn 80 to 90 students, representing roughly 30% of the incoming class. Pāhoa High and Intermediate, meanwhile, created a pre-algebra course specifically for freshmen struggling with math fundamentals. Pāhoa serves a student population where 64% fall into the low socio-economic status category, compared with a 44% state average, and 43.5% identify as Native Hawaiian, according to Hawaiʻi Academies.
The Hawaiʻi education department offers summer school, counseling, personalized learning plans and other resources to freshmen at risk of falling behind, and has declared a goal of promoting more freshmen to 10th grade by improving academic readiness and engagement. Two students who eventually found their way through show how different that path can look. Shylyn Jimenez earned her high school diploma after taking an extra year and has since enrolled in a cosmetology program at Honolulu Community College. Danni-Cheree Lee's son repeated sixth and seventh grades before graduating on time in 2022.
A Sharp Contrast With National Trends
Nationally, grade retention has been falling for more than a decade. Federal civil rights data compiled by Big Local News and The Hechinger Report shows less than 2% of U.S. K-12 students overall repeated a grade in the 2021-2022 school year, down from roughly 3% a decade earlier — making Hawaiʻi's ninth-grade numbers a striking outlier. Researchers describe the broader pattern behind Hawaiʻi's situation as the “ninth-grade bulge” or “9th grade shock,” a well-documented national phenomenon in which ninth grade consistently shows higher enrollment and retention than any other high school grade, since it's often the first year students must earn credits in core subjects to advance.
Chronic absenteeism has compounded the problem. A joint analysis by researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth found that chronic absenteeism in Hawaiʻi public schools dropped from 33.7% in 2022 to 23.7% in 2025, but remains roughly 10 percentage points above pre-pandemic levels, according to the Education Scorecard. The state's own Strive HI Performance System results for 2024-2025 showed 76% of public school students met regular attendance benchmarks, a 1 percentage point increase over the prior year, per the Hawaiʻi State Department of Education.
Despite the freshman bottleneck, Hawaiʻi's overall high school completion numbers have kept climbing. The Class of 2025 reached a record 87% on-time four-year graduation rate, up from 86% for the Class of 2024, according to Hawaiʻi P-20 Partnerships for Education. It's a pattern the state has managed before under different circumstances: in April 2020, the Board of Education temporarily waived graduation credit requirements for seniors amid pandemic-era learning disruptions, showing that promotion standards here have flexed before during a widespread academic crisis.
The spending backdrop adds another layer to the debate. Hawaiʻi public schools spent $23,935 per student in combined state, local, and federal funds during the 2024-2025 fiscal year, placing the state among the highest per-pupil spenders in the nation, as Hoodline has previously reported. That level of investment sits uneasily alongside a freshman retention rate that outpaces nearly every other state, leaving Big Island educators to keep testing summer programs, pre-algebra courses, and attendance interventions against the reality that some 14- and 15-year-olds are still being asked to repeat the year that most determines whether they finish high school at all.
