THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT  
              Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Friday, August 11, 1995                TAG: 9508100176
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON    PAGE: 16   EDITION: FINAL  
SOURCE: BY GARY EDWARDS, CORRESPONDENT
                                             LENGTH: Medium:   78 lines

CORRECTION/CLARIFICATION: **************************************************** ************* The names of Postal Service employees Selma Wilder and Fran Sansone were transposed in a story in The Beacon Aug. 11 about children who cleaned mailboxes in their Colony Oaks neighborhood. Also, Cynthia Skeete was the parent who supervised the project. The children, who cleaned the boxes without help from their parents, used buckets of water, not a hose. Correction published Wednesday, August 16, 1995. ***************************************************************** DIRTY MAILBOXES SPUR KIDS TO ACTION POSTAL OFFICIALS WERE IMPRESSED BY COLONY OAKS' CLEAN-THINKING CHILDREN.

Leah Skeete, 10, and her brother, Leander, 8, got to talking with their neighbors, Wendell and Krystal Patterson and Aaron Edwards.

Freed from school by summer vacation, they spent some time discussing video games, television shows and other topics - and one subject not normally associated with youngsters.

The five Colony Oaks residents share cluster mailboxes. One of them asked if the others had noticed how dirty the community mailboxes were. Pretty gross was the collective answer. Instead of glossing over the subject like most kids would, the five friends decided to gloss the mailboxes.

``Aaron goes out to get our mail just about every day and noticed them, how dirty they were,'' said Jennifer Edwards-Fulk, Aaron's mother. ``Eggs on them, for example.''

On Aug. 2, the civic-minded Indian Lakes Elementary School students got together with their parents, buckets of warm water, a spray cleaner and cloths and scrubbed and hosed the boxes clean.

For their efforts, they were rewarded with a tour of the Acredale Postal Station, which serves the Colony Oaks neighborhood. The Aug. 5 visit began at 9 a.m. and included a tour of the facility, cookies and sodas and presentation of certificates by Selma Wilder, customer services manager at Acredale. Colony Oaks letter carrier Rick Ross showed the children and their parents how mail is sorted at the frantically busy facility. Fran Sansone, customer relations coordinator for the Postal Service, presented them with red, white and blue pens and hand-held calculators.

``We have 800 streets on our routes,'' said Wilder. ``We're the second busiest station in Virginia Beach, next to Lynnhaven.''

Many of the customers on the Acredale routes have cluster mailboxes, usually about a dozen or so addresses to a box, Wilder said. A carrier opens the street side with a key and deposits the mail. Letter carriers don't usually see the back side, the side from which tenants remove their mail.

Wendell Patterson does. The 5-year-old will enter kindergarten next month. He and his sister, Krystal, 8, told their mother, Stacy, what they saw and what they wanted to do about it.

``I thought it was great,'' she said. ``I talked to Cynthia (Skeete) and Jennifer and we sort of supervised. They did all the work in a couple of hours.''

Wilder called the Colony Oaks cleaning crew special.

``I've been at the post office for 28 1/2 years and I've never known anyone to do this before,'' she said. ILLUSTRATION: Photos by GARY EDWARDS

The kids from Colony Oaks used buckets of warm water, spray cleaner

and cloths to clean the community's cluster mailboxes. ``I've been

at the post office for 28 1/2 years and I've never known anyone to

do this before,'' said Selma Wilder, customer services manager at

the Acredale Postal Station.

Honored, treated to cookies and sodas and given a tour of the

Acredale Postal Station were, left to right: Wendell Patterson,

Aaron Edwards, Leander Skeete, Leah Skeete and Krystal Patterson.

by CNB