'This year has been record-breaking,' says Ms Awakuni. 'One pupil gained a perfect 800 out of 800 in the United States-wide colleges admissions test in maths, another got 760 and a third pupil got 750 in the verbal test.'

Campbell High, which has pupils aged 15 to 18, earned Breakthrough School status in 2004 and Ms Awakuni, who reorganised the school into smaller learning communities, was awarded National Principal of the Year in 2004-5.

The school is also one of five in the US singled out in an international study* of transformational schools by school leadership guru Brian Caldwell and his colleague Jessica Harris.

Yet the turnaround was achieved against a backdrop of poverty and disadvantage - more than a third of pupils receive free or subsidised lunches and it is estimated that up to half of the parents never made it to college - and its success bears lessons for schools around the world.

The fightback, says Ms Awakuni, was underpinned by a strategy of building and exploiting partnerships with colleges, companies and the community.

The aim was to develop what Mr Caldwell calls the school's social capital - the resources, specialist knowledge and good will the school can bring in from the world outside its walls - with knock-on effects on raising the quality of teaching, enriching the curriculum and improving the self-esteem of students.

'It is helping us do more with less,' says Ms Awakuni. 'We don't have the funds or the expertise to do it all by ourselves.'

Campbell High is located in Eva Beach, an economic backwater where the main source of employment, a sugar plantation, closed in the 1990s. Most parents - nearly half are Filipino, the rest an eclectic mixture of Hawaiian, white and African American, Hispanic, Samoan, Chinese, Korean and Japanese - work in low-paid blue-collar jobs in hotels and service industries up to two hours' drive away in Honolulu, on the other side of Pearl Harbour.

Eva Beach's historic role as a housing area for a naval base and marine corps, plus a recent influx of developers building golf courses and expensive new houses, has provided opportunities that Ms Awakuni has assiduously exploited.

A joint venture with the military has brought in retired experts to help set up and teach a robotics programme, using higher levels of automated computer design than the school could otherwise have accessed and the students now compete for robotics awards nationally.

'We have also been approached to start an engineering academy because they need workers at Pearl Harbour,' says Ms Awakuni. 'The military also sponsors grants, which we aggressively apply for.'

A naval officer cadet programme, with a curriculum geared to joining the service, has signed up 150 pupils who take extra classes before and after school. It has also enabled the school to provide services to the community, including organising parking and providing guides at events.

The knock-on effect on breaking the image of a school of troublemakers is invaluable as it encourages the community to give back to the school.

An alliance with the developers paid off when they bought the school an aquatic science system, allowing pupils to grow and sell fish. 'It's a working relationship,' says Rowena Martinez, the school's parent facilitator. 'They want to help kids who are smart in growing fish or learning about the ocean. They are gong to end up hiring them in the long run.'

With the developers come building contractors, carpenters and electricians - and few seem to escape Ms Awakuni's powers of persuasion. 'They all come to our school and conduct classes with our kids,' says Ms Martinez.

They bring knowledge that teachers might not have and give practical lessons on building houses or robots. 'For the kids, it not just about bringing in textbooks,' Ms Martinez says. 'It's actually using their hands and the textbooks with the guy who actually does it our there in the yard.'

A link with a media company helps pupils to visit studios, forge relationships with professionals and gain careers advice while convincing opinion formers that Campbell High students are serious about their work and worth taking the time to help.

When one TV channel switched to digital, it called the school and offered its analogue equipment and furniture. 'All we had to do was go over and pick it up - thousands of dollars of equipment and furniture,' says Ms Awakuni. 'Our TV production students started with nothing in 2000; now they are winning awards.'

Some of the most important joint ventures have been developed with four universities and several colleges - the former to bring in teacher trainees and help recruit future teachers, the latter to bring in more specialist knowledge.

The latest partnership has brought the University of Hawaii's master of education programme to the school. A professor spends four days a week at Campbell High, working with 12 resident student teachers who also carry out action research projects with the qualified staff.

'This helps by osmosis,' says Laurie Katadirei Hoshino, head of curriculum development. 'The teacher candidates talk to staff about what they are doing in the classroom at department or team meetings, sharing ideas that have worked - and that spreads to the members of the team.'

It is also a deliberate recruiting method. 'With our isolated position and the poverty, if new teachers do come, they can have a difficult time acclimatising,' says Ms Awakuni. 'This way they are getting used to the culture and want to stay.'

She is using partnerships with colleges to bring in instructors to teach previously uncovered subjects such as world history and drama.

Mr Hoshino says a key change has been the rescheduling of the school day into four 82-minute lesson periods to allow every teacher to spend a quarter of the day on professional development. Education experts from the US mainland and elsewhere in Hawaii are brought in daily to help staff improve teaching methods and make better use of test data.

Parents have been won over by the changes they see in their own children and the extent to which Campbell High invites them to share students' successes and to support their push for college places, subsidies and scholarships.

At quarterly honours nights, pupils achieving good grades or deemed most improved are invited with their parents to dinner with the principal to celebrate.

'It's like a mini-graduation. We used to have about 300 students receiving awards; now we have up to 750,' says Ms Awakuni. The number of parents attending has risen from 50 to 400.

Financial aid nights are held to talk parents and students through the steps for applying online for means-tested subsidies for college courses or scholarships. Computer stations are available for this purpose and used regularly at the school by parents in the afternoons.

Brian Caldwell says innovative schools around the world are realising that while more money and resources are vital for improving education, there is no need to rely solely on the traditional source of government.

'The outstanding schools that we have studied have been really good at building support from the wider community - which is also demonstrated in Hong Kong - while many schools that fall by the wayside are struggling to do things by themselves and have cut themselves off from the broader community,' he says.

Changing the perception of Campbell High, rebuilding trust and piecing together a tapestry of partnerships has been a long hard slog.

Enrolment has shot up to 2,500 and pupils have won at least one of the two Gates Millennium scholarships - giving fully paid tuition, books and living costs for four years at any US university - awarded to the state for the past five years. But there will be no resting on laurels.

'Everybody wants to know the quick fix but there is no magic bullet,' says Ms Awakuni. 'The cycle never stops. Our job will never end.'

*An International Project to Frame the Transformation of Schools, Educational Transformations, 2008.