Exciting things are happening in Star City, Arkansas. This small town of a little more than 2,000 people just learned that its high school Environmental and Spatial Technology (EAST) program was named the 2007 recipient of the Timothy R. Stephenson Founder's Award by the EAST Initiative, an educational nonprofit that oversees EAST programs nationally.

How did a small, rural school stand out from the field of more than 170 programs nationally? The school merely motivated its students to outperform anyone's expectations in providing community service using very sophisticated technology tools.

Among the projects that the Star City students have undertaken are an awareness seminar in the opportunities for women in high-tech fields; a comprehensive, anti-drunk-driving campaign (which has led to collaboration with the Arkansas State Police on a statewide video campaign); and a seminar titled "Enough is Enough," involving local self-defense instructors and the Arkansas Attorney General's office, that aims to raise awareness of the issues of child abuse and abduction. Any of these seminars would be worthwhile for local teens to attend, but the Star City students are actually coordinating and developing these activities. They are taking charge of their education in a way that benefits their whole community.

But that's not all the students from Star City are doing. They have developed and hosted a senior adult technology training program that teaches basic technology skills to the elderly in the community--a project that is being replicated in other communities in the region. They have collected data on the availability of broadband access in their town as part of a regional project aimed at increasing this availability. They have collected oral history of the wartime experiences of local veterans. They are collaborating with a local environmental group and gathering GIS data on a local bayou (which just happens to be the longest in the world, and one of the two most ecologically diverse bayous in North America). Somewhere amid all of this activity, the 57 students in the Star City EAST program also go to English, math, and history classes and worry about prom dates and homecoming basketball games just like every other high school student in the country.

The EAST program