Recently, Hawaii, like many other states, has been buckling under a $1 billion deficit. The state’s Department of Education has had to cut $468 million from its budget to compensate for the budget shortfalls. Public school teachers have been required to take a 7.9 percent pay cut and Governor Linda Lingle, with State Teachers Association, adopted a measure allowing 17 furlough days each for the next two years. Now students, who formerly spent 180 days in the classroom each year, will be spending only 163 days with underpaid teachers scrambling to make up the lost hours.