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SITE OF THE WEEK

Since this review appears, the Lighthouse Kids have talked a New Hampshire senator into obtaining a $250,000 matching grant. New Hampshire, we think, should step up to the plate and pay the other hald. Instead, the Lighthouse Kids are out raising the matching half of the money to save White Island Light.

VISIT the LIGHTHOUSE KIDS web site

Back in January I told you about the crack in White Island lighthouse in a "scoop" on the front page of this paper. Since then I’ve been getting email from people asking me what’s happening with the lighthouse. Well, it’s still sitting on White Island, and it’s still cracking.

Built before the Civil War, ‘White Light" is New Hampshire’s only offshore lighthouse. Isles of Shoals poet Celia Thaxter grew up there and the gleaming white tower is among the state’s most photographed treasures. Now there’s a widening gap four bricks thick at the base of the unoccupied lighthouse, Left to the brutal sun, salt water, ice, wind and waves 10 miles out to sea, the tower is in grave danger. The state of NH owns the lighthouse, but has zero money budgeted for the repair. The Parks and Recreation Department has applied for federal funds, but to no avail. It’s an accident waiting to happen.

The scoop really belongs to the seventh graders in Sue Reynold’s class at North Hampton Middle School – now calling themselves The Lighthouse Kids. Reynolds is also captain of the tour boat Uncle Oscar. She learned about the cracking lighthouse and told her students about the problem. Every Friday the students devote time to community service and a bunch of them adopted White Island lighthouse as their project. They tried to tell the world about the crack in the tower by building a web page on their school web site, but the world didn’t notice. They contacted state agencies and politicians, but kids prefer instant gratification to glacial stratification. Reynolds bused a group of the them into Portsmouth and we brainstormed about ways to get the public to listen to their story.

All kids are good at getting attention and modern kids have enormous media savvy. They quickly realized this was a public relations puzzle. They needed to sharpen their message, to create more "sales" tools, design a logo, get a campaign slogan and find a slicker name. Mostly, the kids said, they had to get some news coverage. So we did.

"At first there was a lot of people who wanted to do it [save the lighthouse]," says Crhis Koenig, one of the Lighthouse Kids, "But then it got to be too much work, so a lot of people left. But now that we’re in the newspaper and things, everybody wants in again."

Nothing succeeds like success. After appearing in Fosters the kids were approached for articles by the Boston Globe, The Union Leader, Lighthouse Digest and Seacoast newspapers from Newburyport, to Hampton to Portsmouth.

Trading on their success, the middle-schoolers created a PowerPoint slide presentation and took their show on the road. Lighthouse Kids recently addressed the Isles of Shoals Historic Research Association (ISHRA). They spoke to the Hampton Rotary and the Kittery Point Yacht Club, and have sent letters to many other civic groups requesting an audience. In September they will become the first student group to address the American Lighthouse Foundation at a conference in New Bedford, Mass. They’re building momentum.

THE WEB SITE MAKERS

LigthhouseKids.com is a work in progress. The first version was a couple of pages of text with no pictures, pretty stark. The newest version is more colorful, a little overwhelming actually, with a total of five pages that briefly outline the story. Koenig says, even though this is supposed to be a school project, he plans to get together some friends and work on the next version of the web site over the summer.

Sky Hooper, who worked on the project all year, says the web site and slide show actually started out to be a movie. Hooper and others filmed the lighthouse last fall from Mrs. Reynolds boat, and worked with an Apple computer program iMovie to create a short documentary.

"The day was too foggy and we couldn’t really see the crack. The movie had a ton of work left to do and didn’t really tell a lot of information about the lighthouse, but the PowerPoint presentation and the web site did, so we decided to do them first."

"We still have to fix it," Hooper says of the web site. "It has a couple mistakes on it right now and we want to develop it a little better."

THE UP SHOT

To date the Lighthouse Kids have raised $1,200. That’s a far cry from the quarter of a million dollars the NH Department of Parks and Rec has suggested the repair may cost, but it’s $1,200 more than the state itself has ponied up. A recent fund-raiser at the Seacoast Science Center netted $200 in donations. The kids have created a T-shirt with their web site URL and a picture of a lighthouse that is saying "Save Me!" The money for the T-shirts and presentation materials comes from money the kids have donated themselves.

What they’re getting, on the side, is a million dollar education in what we used to call "experiential" learning. When I was a teacher, I believed that 90% of what a kid learns happens outside the formal class structure. My supervisors didn’t agree. I didn’t teach very long.

Sue Reynolds’ students are shaping their own real world curriculum. They are talking to the decision-makers, and influencing them. Now the press is calling the kids. The whole class got to tour inside the Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse in New Castle, something I’ve wanted to do for decades. Teacher Reynolds says she wants to get a group out onto White Island this summer so they can see, touch and smell the project.

Dylan Leavitt just finished the group’s new "Save the Lighthouse" brochure, built on her home computer in a software called PrintMaster. She was among the students who recently addressed ISHRA and shared in the thrill of the audience response.

"We sold one T-shirt, and some books, but when we looked in the donations bucket, there was like four twenty dollar bills in there!," Leavittt says. "Today we got a $75 donation from Exeter Hospital."

Riding the publicity train, the group just created donation buckets that they will distribute to local stores. They have more media events on the calendar. They want to get on TV.

"We have to make people aware of our cause," Hooper says. "The state doesn’t really have the money to fix it. They can’t even pass a bill until 2003.

I asked why they didn’t just make protest signs and picket the state offices in Concord until the government took action. "Nah," one of the kids said, "then people might just think we were weird or something."

In June the Lighthouse Kids will graduate and a new team will matriculate into their positions at North Hampton Middle School, bringing new energy and new ideas. The 7^th graders have already met with the 6^th graders to initiate them into their new responsibilities as future Lighthouse Kids. A lot of the graduating members say they will continue to help out, even though they’re older now.

The headlines, the web site, the $1,200 are just artifacts of what’s really going on here. These kids are growing up, making choices, making mistakes, changing the world. It’s not easy to save a lighthouse, they’ve discovered. Life takes more time than a video game.

"What we were thinking about doing would be to take some people to go up there and make it so the cracks won’t get any bigger by filling them in – to hold them in a state where they won’t get any worse," Koenig says.

"The people that are in this group now, they know that by the time it does get fixed, were probably going to be in high school. It’s going to take awhile." Koenig says.