About 50 students attend the Hawaiian immersion school, taught in Hawaiian. One school has a special focus on technology, while another uses phonics. One emphasizes hands-on activities in learning, and another follows a more traditional "paper and pencil" path, said principal Dora Hong.

Kapa'a Elementary serves a wide area, from the Hawaiian Homes-dominated region of Anahola, through the business and tourism center of Kapa'a, to the rural uplands along Kawaihau Road and parts of the bedroom community of Wailua Homesteads.

It's a sprawling campus. Buildings range from aged board-and-batten structures to long, one-story concrete classroom buildings, with a sprinkling of portable classrooms.

At its peak, the school had 1,500 students, but the number has dwindled. Hong identified three reasons for the decline. The sixth grade was moved to the recently built Kapa'a Intermediate School. Some students have been drawn off to a new Kapa'a charter school. And as in schools islandwide, there has been a decline in the number of school-age children.

But there's no shortage of interesting stuff for students at Kapa'a Elementary. As an example, each student in teacher Karen Cole's fifth-grade class has a Tungsten hand-held computer, purchased through a grant.

The kids use them to keep records of their project in monitoring water quality in Kapa'a Stream, and to do things such as solving math problems. The electronic gadgets are wireless, so a student's work can be sent to a central class computer, then displayed on a screen for the whole class to view. The students can then explain their work from their desks.

"I believe we're the only elementary school in the state with this technology," Hong said.

• What are you most proud of? "I'm really proud of the students. It's such a bunch of energetic children," said principal Hong.

• Best-kept secret: "We're a big school, but most folks don't realize that we do have the internal schools, so you're actually sending your child to a school of 175 to 200."

• Everybody at our school knows: Auntie Charlene Bukoski, who is a clerk typist but also helps out in the cafeteria.

• Our biggest challenge: Making required annual academic progress, a difficulty in part because the school serves such a diverse community.

• What we need: The school is switching to a new math program, and while it has the textbooks it needs, it can use supplemental resources of various kinds, including volunteers willing to come and help tutor students.

• Projects: One example is a fourth-grade class that is restoring limu beds on the reef off 'Aliomanu under the guidance of teacher Kalei Arinaga.

• Special events: There are many. One upcoming event in one of the schools-within-a-school is a family reading festival, in which people from the community will give oral readings.