How Farrington High School Students Improved Financial Fair’s Completion Rate With GLSS
Hawaii
Education
Finance
50%
Allison Popa
Farrington High School Student
Project Leader
At Farrington High School, students engage in a student-led financial fair where they simulate navigating real-world scenarios such as budgeting, managing debt, and planning for the future. The Kuleana Fair, hosted on the school campus, needed a space that could accommodate 50+ students moving between activities. However, the cafeteria’s large, fixed tables reduced usable space and significantly limited students’ ability to complete all stations, creating a clear need to improve the process flow of the layout and location of the fair.
Allison, a member of the operations management team for the fair, utilized her GLSS Yellow Belt Training to tackle the challenge of low fair completion. By leveraging data-driven insights and a curious mindset, she pinpointed root causes and implemented direct, effective solutions. Allison’s work enhanced the overall event experience, highlighting how thoughtful process improvement can create meaningful impact for the entire school community.
Allison gathered data on student completion during the Kuleana Fair.
After the event, Allison recorded that only 57.8% attending students completed all Fair activities. Allison wanted to reduce the number of unfinished participants and discovered that the root problem was not the process itself, but the Fair’s location.
She created Flow Maps of the Kuleana Fair in the cafeteria and in the library to compare how students moved through each layout. These maps showed where traffic bottlenecks formed, how often students skipped stations, and how much usable space was lost to large cafeteria tables, as well as where Motion and Waiting waste occurred compared to the more open library setup.
After relocating the event to the library, the student completion percentage increased to 85.1%, an improvement of 47%.
To sustain this solution, Allison created a Kuleana Fair Control Plan, including an event schematic and step-by-step setup and breakdown guide so future teams can follow the same layout and traffic flow. This simple, repeatable standard work document ensures the Fair is consistently run in the improved space and supports maintaining high completion rates.
Allison’s project proved that by focusing on the root cause, results can improve dramatically. Thanks to her GLSS Training, Allison turned the Kuleana Fair around.
With GLSS’s innovative training and real-world focus, any student can discover how to solve problems, get results faster, and set the stage for a future filled with purpose.
