UH Hilo director of nursing school Jeanette Ayers-Kawakami found UH System leadership program “an amazing experience”
During the program, Prof. Ayers-Kawakami worked on a team project that has the potential to make a difference in addressing student retention. “It was enlightening.”
Story by Samantha Dane/UH Hilo Stories.
The director of the School of Nursing at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo says being selected for the 2025-2026 UH President’s Emerging Leaders Program (PELP) was an honor.
“I felt it marks a pivot toward strategic institutional governance,” says Jeanette Ayers-Kawakami, a UH Hilo alumna now a tenured professor of nursing and director of the nursing school at her alma mater. She attended the PELP program while on sabbatical last academic year during which her goal was to undertake multiple activities designed to align her professional growth with UH Hilo and the nursing school’s missions.
PELP was a perfect fit for her plans. As a professional development opportunity for highly motivated faculty and staff, the leadership program identifies and develops future campus and system leaders. Members of the cohort are mentored through the program by upper UH management.
“I wanted to branch out and explore new horizons and potentially identify and nurture leadership opportunities for myself,” says Ayers-Kawakami. “It was truly an amazing experience, an engaging experience, I left wanting to know and do more.”
Ayers-Kawakami says that learning from and being mentored by upper-level administrators across UH “was such a rich learning experience, and I had come to appreciate more what their roles entail. I felt like they had a genuine interest and commitment to engaging with the group and actively wanted to hear our input.”
Ayers-Kawakami was part of the program’s Cohort XI with 24 participants. Two others from UH Hilo were also part of the cohort: director of the business college Todd Inouye and senior advisor Comfort Sumida.
“I wanted to work on something that could have the potential to really make a difference in addressing student retention, due to the complex challenges faced across academic institutions, including UH Hilo”
The cohort was split into groups of four, where each team developed projects based on their shared interests.
With mentorship from UH System Vice President for Academic Strategy Deborah Halbert and UH Hilo Chancellor Bonnie Irwin, Ayers-Kawakami along with Sumida and two others from the cohort — members from UH System offices Lynsey Bow, program director of counseling and advising, and Merrissa Brechtel, a senior policy and advising program specialist for student affairs — worked together to develop their project, “Enhancing Student Success: Harvesting UH Student Voices to Inform a Common Standard of Care.”
Based on the recognition that in order to improve student success, students’ voices must be heard to fully understand their needs, the project addressed student success for new incoming and transfer students through UH systemwide alignment.
“I knew going into the program that I wanted to work on something that could have the potential to really make a difference in addressing student retention, due to the complex challenges faced across academic institutions, including UH Hilo,” says Ayers-Kawakami.
The team reached out to students, faculty, and advisors across the UH System to better understand the challenges faced by incoming students and how to address them.
“It was enlightening to see the responses we received regarding challenges students, faculty, and advisors perceived to be barriers,” says Ayers-Kawakami.
A key takeaway she found particularly interesting from the faculty surveys is that transfer issues are not isolated, “they reflect a system-level coordination problem across UH campuses, especially between the community colleges and four-year institutions,” Ayers-Kawakami explains.
“Ideally,” she says, “I would love to see a centralized advising center across the entire UH system that provides advising for all campuses to assist with academic planning, course registration, and major exploration for students across multiple campuses, to help better improve and streamline the transfer process from the community college’s to the university.”
UH Hilo Chancellor Irwin found great value in the team’s project.
“I was excited to learn about the results of the student voices project,” says Irwin. “It aligns well with other things we are doing on campus to capture student input so that we may improve our systems of student support.”
Overall, Ayers-Kawakami found the leadership program quite valuable, furthering her knowledge in navigating complex organizational dynamics and managing the systemic changes necessary to support UH Hilo and its School of Nursing, as well as the broader UH system.
“This higher-level administrative preparation is balanced by a parallel commitment to the moral and ethical foundations of nursing education,” she says.
“I feel inspired and encouraged to continue efforts towards academic innovation that can result in student success.”
With the new-found knowledge she gained through PELP, Ayers-Kawakami returned this semester to her positions as a professor and as director of the School of Nursing. In addition to her director duties, she’s teaching two online classes this fall on transcultural care and health promotion (NURS 350).
“I’ll be honest, it was not an easy transition returning from sabbatical in August,” she says. “I had to get up to date very quickly on what transpired over the course of the last year.” With a whole year of catch-up and a campus community still recovering from the effects of Hurricane Lala, Ayers-Kawakami says it wasn’t easy.
“Needless to say, I hit the ground running from day one with my roller blades on, but felt like I needed rocket launchers attached!”
The challenges on transitioning back to campus are understandable with much of her time during sabbatical fully focused on her own professional and academic development.
She prepared to sit for the Certified Nurse Educator exam, a certification that Ayers-Kawakami says “represents a commitment to the highest standards of excellence in academic nursing practice.” With the CNE certification under her belt, she says it provides the School of Nursing with a competitive edge.
She also submitted an article for publication early next year in the American Journal of Nursing, a premier journal of nursing with an acceptance rate of less than 20% of submitted articles.
In addition, she was elected as chair of the advisory board for the Hawaiʻi State Center for Nursing to provide guidance and feedback, a role she says was not originally part of her sabbatical plans, but she was deeply committed to regardless.
Thanks to the academic leave, the emerging leader was able to pursue these projects, returning to UH Hilo more ready than ever to take on the new school year using the new skills she’s learned.
With absolute devotion to improving student success within her department and across campus and the UH System, Ayers-Kawakami says, “As a past PELPer, I feel inspired and encouraged to continue efforts towards academic innovation that can result in student success.”
Seeing what’s possible through PELP, she has a renewed commitment to collaboration across UH campuses.
“As a professor, it is very easy to get ʻsiloed’ within my own department or even the campus. But I really wanted to get outside of my comfort zone and move from a single department/campus mindset to understanding the broader system-wide challenges,” she explains in an email. “I felt it was my kuleana (responsibility) to engage in this system-wide initiative to better prepare myself on my own campus.”
As an alumna of UH Hilo and now PELP, Ayers-Kawakami is committed to giving back to both the UH Hilo community and UH System as a whole. She says she’s more than prepared to step up as a leader at UH Hilo. It’s a skill she already possessed and exemplified through her work, but she’s more prepared than ever thanks to her time at PELP.
“Ultimately, I do what I do because I love what I do,” she says.
Story by Samantha Dane, a biology major at UH Hilo. UH Hilo Stories editor Susan Enright contributed.
