Seventeen years ago, two Cal Arts professors started the Side Street project, a Pasadena, California-based arts organization which every year reaches 1,000 children ages 5-11 and teaches them how to use tools and create unique objects out of wood.

Operating from mobile units, or travel trailers, these hands-on teaching programs are so economically conservationist, 80 percent of donations go directly to delivering services. To stretch the money even further, a year ago Side Streets purchased solar panels with a $50,000 grant from The Ahmanson Foundation - installation overseen by Side Street's staff and volunteers.

This 3,000-watt solar array delivers needed power to light the mobile teaching units and to power tools and other electrical units within the trailers. The teaching trailers currently reside at 730 North Fair Oaks, on unused land donated by the city, but when this lease expires they are mobile enough to take up residence elsewhere, displaying what one Side Streets worker has dubbed "stability through mobility". Like turtles in their shells, the trailers can move on a moment's notice if need be, though they have one advantage turtles lack; mobile power through solar energy.

Side Street's programs are becoming increasingly important as cash-strapped school districts, confronted by decreasing enrollment, lowered funding and an increasingly negative economy, are forced to close on-site art programs.

The combination of mobility and solar energy has allowed the organization to reach more children in a timely manner at less expense. Without the cost of office rent and electricity, Side Streets mobile units are now focused on expanding their services to include high school students, and expand program offerings to include art media other than wood.

To fulfill this objective, Side Streets plans to purchase two more trailers, hopefully also solar-equipped, which they will also convert to classrooms with interchangeable work stations. That way, they can reduce student costs more than 30 percent and still quadruple capacity.

This sort of thinking, so far outside the box it is mind-boggling, may represent a wave of the future in which mobile teaching units serve smaller and smaller but geographically disparate student bodies more effectively. Given the cost structure of modern school districts, it may in fact be an idea which has found its time.

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