KAILUA, Kona — The bustle of students racing to meet the morning bell at Kealakehe Intermediate School was interrupted by an accident, a student who fell on a basketball court and apparently suffered a seizure.

As the fire department rescue crew left the campus, Kealakehe principal Donald Merwin quickly got back on schedule. On a campus with more than 1,000 students in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades, stuff happens, and staff adjusts.

The booming Kona economy has created a tight labor market that rippled out to affect the school, and Kealakehe cannot fill a number of support positions, including campus security manager, Merwin said. Custodians and Title 1 reading tutors volunteer to help in the cafeteria, counselors help to offset the shortage of security officers, and so on.

"Basically I think we meet the need, but people have to take on dual roles," Merwin said. The school has been lucky to fill all but two of its teaching positions. In a bad year, the administration might be scrambling to fill a dozen teaching slots, he said.

Children at Kealakehe Intermediate come from a mix of economic backgrounds, and come and go rapidly. Although the area is growing, the school saw a slight decline in enrollment this year, and traced that shift to students who left for private schools, left for charter schools or left the community entirely.

Kealakehe students' families are very mobile, and Merwin estimated that 40 percent of his student body changes each school year. He attributes the large number of students coming and going to economics as Kona's high cost of living and high rents force families to move out.

Some students have attended three to five schools in the past two years, and that makes the school's mission more difficult, he said. When schools try to figure out whether their teaching strategies are working and progress is being made, educators need to see how students perform over time.

"The problem is, when you have kids coming in in August, and you're working with those kids, and they're gone sometime during the middle of the year and you have a new group of kids coming in, it's very difficult to know where those kids are, or what effect you have on them," Merwin said.

The school is under special state oversight in accordance with the federal No Child Left Behind law, but Merwin said student test scores are showing progress: Math scores improved substantially among special-education children, and also improved for the school as a whole.

This year, instead of just measuring the eighth-graders against No Child Left Behind standards, the entire school will be tested.

The intermediate school administration works out of a classroom building, and the intermediate school library is housed in portable classrooms.

Staff members are in suspense as they wait for a $5.8 million library and administration building to go out for bids in December, because the project has been 10 years in the making, Merwin said.