Overview

Island School is a private, co-educational, college-preparatory school in Lihue on the island of Kauai -- the first Kauai school and the first school on a Hawaiian island other than Oahu profiled in this directory. Founded in 1977, it's located behind the University of Hawaii's Kauai Community College campus. Its high school program was briefly disestablished between 1983 and 1996 due to low enrollment before reopening.

Academics

As a private school, Island School doesn't participate in Hawaii's state assessment reporting the way public schools do, so no proficiency data is available through public sources for this profile.

Neighborhood

Lihue is Kauai's county seat and largest town, with an economy shaped significantly by tourism -- Kauai's main airport is located there.

Crime & safety

Sources on Lihue show a genuine data-quality conflict worth flagging directly: one source explicitly states that "the city of Lihue, Hawaii does not have FBI Crime Statistics," while two other sources (AreaVibes, NeighborhoodScout) present Lihue crime figures they describe as FBI-derived. Setting that conflict aside, the sources that do offer figures roughly agree Lihue's violent crime is below the national average while property crime (plausibly tourism-related, given the airport and visitor traffic) runs somewhat above -- with an overall safety ranking around the 48th percentile nationally, described as "less safe than the Hawaii state average, about as safe as the national average."

We're flagging the FBI-data-availability conflict explicitly rather than picking a side: if Lihue genuinely isn't a full UCR-reporting jurisdiction, then sources claiming FBI-derived Lihue-specific figures may be extrapolating from county-level or estimated data rather than a true local report. This is exactly the kind of provenance question this directory tries to surface instead of paper over.

Our calculated rating

We don't publish a single proprietary score, and for this school we're not showing a rating: no academic data is available (private school), and the safety data itself has an unresolved sourcing conflict. See our ratings methodology.

Sources

  1. Wikipedia, "Island School (Hawaii)," cross-checked against NCES ID 00327106.
  2. BestPlaces.net, Lihue crime data (notes Lihue lacks its own FBI crime statistics).
  3. CrimeGrade.org, Lihue and Kauai County crime analyses, 2025-2026.
  4. NeighborhoodScout and AreaVibes, Lihue crime data, both describing an FBI basis, 2026.