Rural Youths Share Efforts To Keep Home Fires Burning

By Bess Keller

Kearney, Neb.

Echoo Valentine is only 16 years old, but she has already learned a universal lesson of community life. If you want people to show up, she advises an audience here, offer food.

Ms. Valentine and other members of the Students in Action group at her school in tiny Arthur, Neb., did just that last fall. A barbecue supper they organized drew some 125 adults to a meeting—part of an ambitious plan to open a student-run grocery store in their ailing and isolated heartland community.

If the students succeed, Arthur County residents will no longer have to travel 36 miles and more for a jug of milk or a carton of eggs. If the students fail, they still will have learned lessons of economics and community relations, having worked shoulder-to-shoulder with two local women who have made the girls' project...