JACKSON STUDENTS ATTEND RETREAT; PLAN PROJECTS

HARD WORK: Michelle Wright of Rolla (left) and Victoria Ramsey and Jana and Mary Walther of Jackson got down and dirty to help rehab the historic Curfew Center in St. Louis.

RESTORATION WORK: MO-RULES participants gave a much-needed interior facelift to the elegant, historic Curfew Center - thought to have originally been a YMCA - in downtown St. Louis.

MO-RULES BUNCH: The entire 45 students and nine chaperones participating in the MO-RULES retreat posed in their MO-RULES T-shirts, on the capitol steps in Jefferson City.

For five Jackson High School students, a week-long service retreat was only the beginning. The real work will be applying what they learned here at home.

The students took part in the Missouri Rural and Urban Leadership Experience and Services (MO-RULES) community service project retreat in Columbia, Rolla and St. Louis, the last week in June. Forty-five students from nine Missouri high schools participated in the week-long retreat, in which they learned how to plan a community service project.

MO-RULES emanates from the governor's office. State funding goes through the state 4-H office. Cathy Boyd, JHS family and consumer science teacher, has worked with Thomas Robins, an assistant in the governor's office, and Donna Taake, Cape Girardeau County youth specialist at the University Extension office. The school will receive a grant (Robins believes it will be in excess of $1,500) to do a local project this year. He also brought a computer for the family and consumer science classes, with special software that can be used in planning the upcoming project.

Boyd declines to say what the planned project for Jackson is at the moment.

"We have an idea what we're going to do," she said. "We don't know yet, if we can do it. Getting approval is the next step."

The idea of the retreat was to train students to return to their communities and perform a worthwhile community service project. While at MO-RULES, the students (along with adult chaperone Mary Walther) performed a number of service projects. At Columbia, they stained four cabins and a bathroom at Camp BrimShire. At Rolla, they cleaned up a trail at the city's visitor's center. In St. Louis they helped in renovation work on a historic downtown building, now used as a juvenile curfew center.

While visiting Jefferson City, they got to watch Gov. Mel Carnahan sign a pair of bills into law and visited with State Sen. Jerry Howard. They also got to take a seat in the Missouri House chamber. JHS students participating were Victoria Ramsey, Emily Wessell, Nikki Wells, Dawn Lambert and Jana Walther. They are all members of either Future Farmers of America (FFA) or Future Career and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA).

"It was fun. We got to meet a lot of neat people," Lambert said.

"I felt good about what we did while we were there," Wessell added. "It wasn't all play; we worked hard. Everybody was especially nice."

"The first couple of days they spent getting to know each other and learning to work as a team," said Mary Walther. "These youth really worked. I was really impressed."

The groups stayed in dormitories at the University of Missouri-Columbia, UMR and University of Missouri-St. Louis. They also got to ride the Metro, visit Meramac Springs and eat at the Spaghetti Factory in St. Louis.

While in St. Louis, the groups met as teams and formulated projects for their communities. They then presented the ideas to the rest of the group.

"It provides leadership training in how to create and implement a worthwhile service project in their own community," Robins said. "It will result in nine individual service projects."

Boyd expects to announce the Jackson project later in the summer.

"We're anxious to get started as soon as we can," she said. "We're off to a good start so far. We're waiting on a few things. We want to try to get other groups involved. It will be a big community project."