SAFE JOURNEY.(The Talk of the Town)(New York City private schools teaches community service and sensitivity training to students)

The world of New York City private schools is often portrayed as a cutthroat, almost Hobbesian place, but there is a tenderhearted side to it as well. These days, community service and sensitivity training are as central to most private-school curricula as math and geography. At Packer Collegiate, in Brooklyn Heights, for instance, the fifth-grade bake sale, which had originally been intended to benefit a less fortunate school in Tanzania, was jointly dedicated to Tanzania and relief for tsunami victims. And when Marco Sylla, the Packer school's security guard, or "hall master," and an Army reservist, was called up for active duty in December, it seemed only natural that the school would offer him the continued use of his Packer laptop, for keeping in touch, and that the Parent Association would buy him a going-away present--an iPod. One upper schooler loaded the device with classic rock, and several dozen students presented Sylla with farewell cards. At a school assembly, he received a two-minute standing ovation.

To some Packer parents, however, this was not appreciation enough. In his two years on the job, Sylla had learned the names of all nine-hundred-odd students. ("He has an aura of authority, but also of gentleness," one mother said.) What's more, his leaving brought the harsh realities of the war in Iraq close to home--even if, for the time being, Sylla's unit has been assigned to Germany. (He shipped out last week.) Lauren Glant, mother of Willy (sixth grade) and Cullen (third grade), remembered reading that some troops had not been adequately supplied with protective gear, so she came up with an idea: to buy Sylla his own suit of body armor.

Glant turned to Michelle Fuchs, another third-grade parent, and the co-chair of the school's diversity and multiculturalism panel, for help with organizing a fund-raising drive. "At first, I said, 'What? I beg your pardon?' " Fuchs recalled the other day. Body armor is a far cry from brownies. Fuchs signed on, and the two mothers sought the help of the Packer head of school, Bruce Dennis, who sent notice of the armoring cause to the school's e-mail-distribution list.

To be sure, there were skeptics. "Who's actually going to purchase the body armor?" one middle-school mother asked. "Somebody said it costs about fifteen hundred dollars. Is that full body armor? Or just a vest?" She added, "From the little bit of research that I did, I thought all the soldiers on the ground in Iraq were ...