DATE: Friday, November 28, 1997             TAG: 9711270651

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B3   EDITION: FINAL 

COLUMN: Making a Difference 

TYPE: Education 

SOURCE: BY ALETA PAYNE 

DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH                    LENGTH:   46 lines

STUDENTS MAKE SERVICE A PART OF THEIR LIVES

It's great that some students from Kemps Landing Magnet School served dinner to needy families on Thursday.

And it's inspiring that another group of Kemps Landing kids packed boxes of emergency food recently for senior citizens and families with children.

And it's wonderful that students have collected 250 coats so far for an annual project at Eastern Virginia Medical School that provides warm outerwear for those who need it.

But by the time you go through the complete list of volunteer projects that Kemps Landing students, staff and families are planning or involved in - including cleaning the bay, gleaning fields for vegetables, collecting food for the Virginia Beach SPCA, and developing projects to benefit the Make-A-Wish Foundation - you start to run out of superlatives.

Lots of schools give, but Kemps Landing gives in a variety of ways year round.

``The school as a whole wants the kids to know they can make a difference. We try to give them plenty of opportunities to do that,'' said Sharon Bowers, a seventh-grade science teacher at the school who also serves as its academic coordinator and sponsors the service organization One Small Step.

Members of Bowers' group, for instance, try out various projects to determine if they'd be appropriate school-wide and then suggest the ones that work out as opportunities to their classmates.

So, their work serving meals at the Judeo-Christian Outreach Center will soon translate into different grade levels taking on responsibility to serve periodically.

``These children take very seriously the problems of the world,'' Bowers said. ``If you plan it, they will do it.''

In one week of collecting for Thanksgiving meals, for instance, the students school-wide collected enough food for 10 families and $200 for turkeys. The school's H.E.L.P. Club will spend the entire year working on behalf of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. The Student Council Association is also involved in service projects.

Bowers sees an increasing emphasis on promoting social action as part of public education. At Kemps Landing, the commitment is to making community service something students do because it becomes a part of their lives ``rather than something to get checked off for credit,'' she said.

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