You may not hear it on the news, but some things are working in education. Let me tell you about them, and see what you think.

In August many California high school teachers met for a day in Santa Barbara to learn how to connect community service with classroom goals. It's a challenge. Objectives have to be in line with curriculum standards; yet many feel it's imperative that young people have a sense of purposeful learning, and service connects with that better than term papers do.

Founded in 1998, the National Service Learning Exchange is a collaboration of five organizations: FrontRange Earth Force, Institute for Global Education and Service-Learning, National Dropout Prevention Center, National Youth Leadership Council, and Youth Service California.

Also in 1998, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation launched Learning In Deed with $13 million, hoping to encourage service-learning in schools across the nation. Projects must jointly address real community needs and well-defined classroom goals. California is one of five states participating in demonstration projects. Funds are administered by the California Department of Education.

Among those projects, in the year 2000, California established the After School Service Learning Program. Some examples of successful projects are described at the site of Youth Service California, and I guarantee reading about them can make your day. Here are a few.

Del Norte County decided to do outreach to the younger ones in grades 3 through 8. The county has fewer than 30,000, with high Native American and Hispanic populations. Over 70% of children qualify for lunch programs. An after school program called Kids First was established to focus on academics, recreation, and service-learning. In the service-learning portion the children planned, implemented, and accomplished these things: they raised chickens and gave the eggs to needy elders in the community; they rebuilt three school gardens; and they raised a dog for the deaf.

Closer to home, in East Palo Alto, five teen clubs accomplished these things together: Organized a carpool to a local soup kitchen to help the staff prepare and serve food; made weekly visits to a local homeless shelter, and read to children living there while their parents attended job training meetings; restored habitat at a local park; organized a school-wide canned food drive for Thanksgiving; and organized a drive for school supplies for students in Afghanistan.

In Petaluma, the program works with academically-struggling students at two junior high schools. The students made contact with a nearby senior center and gathered information on the needs of the facility and its clients. They learned there was no longer a groundskeeper, so they mowed and weeded the lawn and planted flowers (local stores provided the materials needed). The Activities Director told them many people were lonely. They decided to learn about the seniors: their ages, abilities, and personal histories. The project enriched their own lives as well as those of the seniors, and they were able to articulate what they had learned from it.

This kind of success is worth watching: we'll do that, and keep you posted...