The school is named after a powerful Kaua'i queen, the mother of the island's last king, Kaumuali'i.

Principal Cynthia Matsuoka said middle-school kids can be tough to handle, and there is a higher-than-normal turnover of teachers. Sometimes it's just that Mainland teachers find the cost of living in Hawai'i too high, but often teachers decide to move to schools with lower and upper grades because of the difficulty of working with young teenagers.

"Middle-level kids are really tough. Everything is boring, dull, uncool to them, and teachers have to be really understanding. But everyone here works really hard. Everyone is really dedicated to helping the student," Matsuoka said.

Nishimitsu said there is a full adviser program to help students. And the school tries to keep learning interesting.

One regular program is interdisciplinary education, in which students will take a single concept — perhaps ancient Egyptian civilization — and will study it through the lenses of language, ancient mathematics, the annual flooding of the Nile delta, vegetation, wildlife and more.

"We're constantly upgrading our interdisciplinary units," Nishimitsu said.

What are you most proud of? "We made the Hawai'i School Assessment benchmarks for the year last year," said Nishimitsu.

Best-kept secret: "We have a beautiful Art in Public Places statue that depicts a traditional woman of chiefly Hawaiian rank" done by sculptor Karen Lucas, of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

Everybody at our school knows: 'Iwalani Kanoho-Soares, the school security attendant.

Our biggest challenge: Making the Hawai'i School Assessment benchmarks for this year, since the minimum qualifying marks in math and reading are going to be higher, Nishimitsu said.

What we need: While the school is only five years old, that's a long time for computers. "We need the resources to upgrade our technologies," Nishimitsu said.