By VICTORIA BUDIONO Honolulu Star-Advertiser
Share this story

As public agencies nationwide look to technology to streamline operations and rein in costs, the 91ֱ School Facilities Authority is betting that software — not bricks and mortar — is the key to fixing one of the state’s most daunting infrastructure problems: aging, overcrowded public schools.

The School Facilities Authority, the state agency charged by lawmakers with modernizing school construction, has begun rolling out a digital planning tool called Akamai, a cloud-based configurator designed to automate much of the pre-design and planning work that traditionally takes months — or even years — to complete.

ADVERTISING


SFA officials say the tool could cut pre-planning timelines by as much as 60% and reduce construction costs by up to 15%, savings they argue are essential as 91ֱ confronts billions of dollars in deferred maintenance, portable classrooms and demand for new schools in growing communities.

“Technology is changing the way everyone is doing business. SFA is moving the state forward and fulfilling our critical mission of building school facilities smarter and more efficiently,” SFA Executive Director Riki Fujitani said. “We can cut the time for pre-planning construction tasks by 60 percent and trim our use of state funds by up to 15 percent over traditional methods. We want to make out-of-the box approaches and innovation the new norm.”

The scale of the challenge facing 91ֱ’s public school system is difficult to overstate.

In an interview with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Fujitani said the state Department of Education oversees roughly 21 million square feet of buildings across 4,500 structures, many of which are decades past their intended lifespan.

“They are very old, so you have to basically renew this physical plant,” Fujitani said. “A study was done in 2017. About 500 to 600 of those buildings are at the end of life, just to replace those. That’s $1.3 billion.”

Compounding the problem are approximately 1,800 portable classrooms, which Fujitani said are equivalent to 61 elementary schools worth of temporary facilities, along with the need to build entirely new campuses where population growth is accelerating.

“It’s just staggering,” he said, adding that the state needs a solution that can be deployed at scale — one that’s large, repeatable, cost-efficient and quick to implement. “You can’t fix this problem the old way. You can’t do it like how it was before.”

Historically, school construction projects in 91ֱ have been treated as custom, one-off endeavors — a process that often leads to long timelines, higher costs and maintenance challenges down the line.

Under the conventional approach, each project requires extensive site investigation, stakeholder interviews, custom architectural designs and multiple rounds of revisions before reaching a buildable plan. According to SFA, that pre-design phase alone can take six to 18 months, while the full capital improvement project timeline can stretch beyond five years.

The Akamai configurator is intended to upend that model by standardizing much of the work upfront — and embedding it into software.

“We’ve been tasked as an agency to do things differently, because the state doesn’t have this kind of money,” Fujitani said. “So that’s what led us to think of a scalable solution to solve this.”

The agency commissioned MKThink, a strategic planning and architectural firm with offices in Honolulu and San Francisco, Calif., to help reimagine the school design-to-build process from the ground up.

“SFA is doubling down on our efforts to be a catalyst for positive change in our state by adopting standardized designs to avoid having to reinvent the wheel for each new school building project,” Fujitani said. “This also lowers maintenance costs in the long run because all schools will eventually have the same building parts.”

At its core, Akamai functions as a digital decision- making engine.

Users enter basic information — including the number of students, grade levels, project location, site constraints and whether the project is a new building or classroom replacement. Within hours, the system generates optimized design options, floor plans, material choices and cost estimates — work that would typically require multiple consultants and months of coordination.

“We can input our space constraints and other parameters in the Akamai system and, within the same day, receive options for building designs, floor plans, and use of different types of building materials,” Fujitani said. “This rapid-fire automation allows us to make immediate, multi-perspective decisions with accurate cost estimates and projected funding requirements.”

Once a configuration is selected, the workflow connects directly to Revit, an industry-standard building information modeling software, automatically producing 3-D schematic drawings, 2-D plans and building specifications.

MKThink CEO Nate Goore said the approach is rooted in the idea that most school projects are fundamentally solving the same problem.

“In the traditional process, that problem is treated as a one-off situation,” Goore said. “But the problem that actually needs to be solved in each one of these new school projects is exactly the same. We have to produce a good environment for students to learn in, a good environment for teachers to teach in.”

Rather than starting from scratch, MKThink aggregated data from principals, teachers, past projects and successful school designs both in 91ֱ and elsewhere.

“We’ve already collected 90-plus percent of what we need in order to execute the project,” Goore said. “The remaining 10% we can get relatively quickly.”

Fujitani acknowledged that standardization has long been a challenge in school construction, where architects and engineers often favor custom designs.

“Standardization is hard because it’s like herding cats,” he said. “You have all these architects, all these engineers doing their own things, and they all want to do it their own way. They all want to win an award.”

But he argued that a software-driven approach enforces consistency in a way policies alone cannot.

“The software makes everything consistent — all the doors the same, all the windows the same, the floor plan is the same,” Fujitani said. “That’s how you get economies of scale.”

The standardized designs can then be adapted to different construction methods, such as prefabrication, steel framing or mass timber, depending on market conditions, while still allowing limited customization — similar to choosing trim levels when buying a car.

Over the past six to seven months, MKThink executives Chris Hong and Emilio Goldenhersch have worked to stitch together more than a dozen existing software platforms into a single cloud-enabled workflow.

“There is no one stop shop where you have one software that does the pre planning, the design, the permitting,” Goldenhersch said. “So that’s why we decided to double down on the entire life cycle process.”

The current version of Akamai focuses on the pre-design and schematic design phases, but additional capabilities are planned for construction documents, procurement and construction beginning next year.

MKThink expects the full system to be ready by early 2027, with the first phase deployed as soon as this summer.

“We are compressing the timeline on these tasks and saving taxpayer dollars so that more funds can be allocated for other pressing needs in our state,” Goore said. “The Akamai digital configurator also reduces human error to avoid costly change orders and delays.”

For SFA, the goal is not just faster projects — but a fundamentally different way of building schools at a scale 91ֱ has never attempted before.

“All these steps still have to be done — permitting, environmental assessments,” Fujitani said. “But you can eliminate and shrink that incredibly using technology. This is the launch of that software that does that for you.”