In recent years, the Kamehameha Schools' Hawaiians-first admissions policy has come under legal attack as racially exclusive. But throughout its 120-year history, the school's policy hasn't been as cut and dried.

Until the early 1960s, the school occasionally admitted non-Hawaiian children of faculty and administrators at its Kapalama Heights campus. In 2002, Kamehameha accepted a non-Hawaiian student from Wailuku to its Maui high school after administrators exhausted the list of qualified Hawaiian applicants.

More recently, the school was forced to admit a non-Hawaiian Kaua'i student, 12-year-old Brayden Mohica-Cummings, to its Kapalama Heights campus to settle a federal court lawsuit challenging the policy.

The Maui student is to graduate this year, and Mohica-Cummings is a sophomore.

"It's a rarity when it happened, but we've had a number of non-Hawaiians attending the schools over the years," said former Kamehameha Schools admissions director Howard Benham, who graduated from the school in 1944.

The admission policy was upheld in December by 15 judges of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but the case had been awaiting Supreme Court action before it was settled yesterday.

Terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but Doe won't be attending Kamehameha Schools because he has already graduated from high school.

The 1884 will of the school's founder, Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, does not state the schools should admit Hawaiians exclusively, but that Hawaiians would have preference in admissions.

That opened the door for the admission of a handful of non-Hawaiian children of Kamehameha Schools employees over the years.

Up until the 1940s, many teachers and staff lived in faculty housing near the campus, which was then near the Bishop Museum in Kalihi.

To avoid the long commute to private and public schools elsewhere on O'ahu, some non-Hawaiian students were given special permission from the school's board of trustees to attend Kamehameha Schools, said Bob Springer, who served as a Kamehameha Schools teacher and administrator from 1959 to 1995.

The practice was stopped in 1962 by president Jim Bushong.

"It wasn't a big thing in those days," said Springer, who headed the school's outreach programs in the early 1990s and now heads Island School, a small independent school on Kaua'i.

"I was never aware of any problems with it."

David Scarlett, a non-Hawaiian student who graduated from the Kapalama Heights campus in 1963, said he felt privileged to attend the Kamehameha Schools.

Scarlett, whose father was on the school's ROTC staff and headed its maintenance department, said he supports the school's current policy of giving preference to Hawaiian students, and that there should be no question that Pauahi meant for her endowment to be used for the Hawaiian people.

"Attending Kamehameha Schools was a great privilege that has great meaning for me," said Scarlett, who is retired and lives in Folsom, Calif.

"It's a privilege and an honor that I can never repay."

Reach Rick Daysog at rdaysog@honoluluadvertiser.com.