Editorial: Not your father’s spring break

Saturday, March 25, 2006 | 7:17 a.m.

At the rate alternative spring breaks are growing, the image of college students drinking on the beach by day and dancing on tabletops by night could be passe in a few years - if it isn't already.

The attention today is more focused on students who devote themselves to community service. In a country needing a healthy dose of good news, these students are delivering.

At least 10,000 students, probably a lot more, spent their break this month volunteering in the Gulf Coast. Their trips were arranged through their schools or through organized alternative spring break programs. As such, each student had an assigned job upon arrival. Many worked at rehabbing homes. Others worked on cleanup projects and still others worked at hospitals, schools, parks and other community-oriented facilities.

One student from a Georgia university, while working to repair a home in New Orleans that had belonged to a family for generations, found more than $30,000 in old $100 bills in an air conditioning vent. She and fellow students turned the money over to the home's owner, who had lost almost everything to Hurricane Katrina. The grateful owner guessed that her father, who had grown up in the Great Depression and was mistrustful of banks, had stashed the money there. The woman called the find a "miracle."

That's just one of the thousands of positive stories coming from the work being done by college students in the Gulf Coast and many other areas around the country. How much better this is than the stories of overdosing, vandalism, rapes, assaults, injuries and arrests that tend to be reported after mass beach parties.

The best news is that alternative spring breaks are a rapidly growing trend. At UNLV a budding program got under way this month, with 12 students traveling to San Luis Valley in southern Colorado to volunteer at the La Puente Home, which provides an array of services to homeless people.

Students involved with this program are showing a lot of maturity and promise for the future.