MULHOLLAND STUDENTS SHOW THEY'RE ALL HEART.

Byline: Dennis McCarthy 

These kids in Kathie Marshall's classroom at Mulholland Middle School in Van Nuys don't realize it, but they're some of the most important people in the city right now.

As important as the mayor, City Council, chief of police, or any of the civic leaders we're counting on to make this city work better for everyone in the future.

Without these kids, it won't happen. Not even close.

Without these kids, it will be business as usual. The haves will have more, the have nots less.

With these kids, it could all change.

There is a program gathering momentum in the Los Angeles Unified School District right now that makes so much sense, it's scary.

Come June 2001, every graduating senior from every high school in this city - about 50,000 kids overall every year - will have taken part in something called a service learning requirement.

It starts next year, and it's not voluntary. It's mandatory.

Simply put, students will be taken out of the classroom and brought into the community to be introduced to some of the social problems of the real world before they graduate and enter that real world.

Each class of students gets to choose which problems. There doesn't seem to be any shortage. Crime and violence, homelessness, literacy, elder abuse, threats to the environment, and hunger just top the list.

Then, as a class, they try to figure out ways to make things better, and how to go about getting involved and maybe even solving some of these problems, especially in their own community.

Will they? Who knows? But, they'll be thinking about them. Studying them and talking about them. It's a start.

And it won't be just the kids in schools who care about such things. Not just extra credit programs for the honor students and service clubs, which are already involved.

It'll be every kid in every school.

That's why the kids in Kathie Marshall's writing class are some of the most important people in the city right now.

They're the pioneers.

Sylvia Cespedes smiles and looks over at Carlos Fregoso. The two 12-year-olds have just been asked if the other kids at school ever get on them for all the time they spend after school and weekends trying to help the children of Kosovo and other children who are the victims of violence or abuse?

Of course, they do, they say.

``A lot of them don't understand why we are spending so much time worrying about these kids when we could be out playing or watching TV,'' Cespedes says. ``I tell them because we want to. We enjoy it.''

Nice to hear, huh? A classroom of 12-year-olds who enjoy tackling society's problems, or as their teacher puts it, ``Being exposed to every type of diversity they can think of.''

Marshall's proud of these kids, and she should be. Last year, after deciding the problem they wanted to attack was children who are the victims of violence and abuse, they went out and raised almost $600 for the American Red Cross International Relief Fund by making cloth hearts they sold for $3 each.

Then they knocked on doors in their neighborhoods and wrote to community leaders asking them to write something from their hearts that will go on a big mural that is being constructed at the entrance of their school.

So far, they've received 400 responses that will be part of the mural on what harmony and diversity mean to the people in their community, and how we can all make it work better in the new century than it did in the old.

But that's still not enough for these pioneers. So, they gather after school to visit a nearby convalescent home to talk to the elderly to see what they can do to make their life a little better.

This is the future for every LAUSD student before he or she graduates from high school, says Jan Frieze Martinez, assistant principal at Mulholland, who overseas the service learning program.

``What we're really stressing is active citizenship,'' she says. ``Every student is going to spend time studying and getting involved in some of the pressing social needs in our society to see what they can do to help.''

And it all starts here with kids like Rene Zamora, Kathleen Garcia, Susan Lopez, Alicia Estrada, Erick Serrano and Nilda Pirir.

The pioneers. Some of the most important people in this city right now.

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo: Students at Mulholland Middle School sell cloth hearts to raise money for charity.

Michael Owen Baker/Staff Photographer