To Rachel Muti, 8, a weathered wooden top of a sauerkraut pot was an artifact worthy of inclusion in her third-grade history project.

To Clyde Meanor, 82, the wooden top that Rachel showed him yesterday at J.H. Brooks Elementary School was instantly familiar.

"We made lots of sauerkraut like this," Mr. Meanor told Rachel, who had done the project by interviewing her great-aunt.

Mr. Meanor met Rachel yesterday on a first-ever bus tour of the Moon Area School District organized for community members. The tour, funded by a grant from the Pennsylvania State Education Association, brought about 20 community members -- many of them senior citizens -- into five different Moon Area schools.

The bus tour was the brainchild of Brooks Elementary third-grade teacher Amber Jackson, who applied for the $1,500 grant and planned the event while on maternity leave.

"We were targeting people who don't have a lot of interaction with our schools," said Ms. Jackson. "We wanted to enhance the Moon Area School District's image and make new connections in the community."

And so the group of seniors and community members boarded a school bus at the Robin Hill Senior Citizens Center and set off for a five-hour tour.

Ruth Meanor, 82, was a cafeteria worker in the Moon school system once upon a time, and she and her husband both graduated from high school in the district in 1943.

When she was growing up, there was only one stoplight in all of Moon, she said, and her high school graduating class had only 43 people.

"We have seen a lot of changes in the schools," she said. "The dress codes were very different." Her husband always wore a necktie throughout school, she said, and girls wore skirts -- never pants.

For 81-year-old Don Maloney, who taught business classes at Moon Area High School before he retired in the early 1990s, the most dramatic differences showed in the actual educational substance.

Back when he was in third grade, students never would have been able to do anything as involved as the poster boards that the Brooks students did for their family history project.

"What they have to work with today is so much greater than what we had," he said, noting that putting together the project required skills such as interviewing, historical research and word processing. "We thought it was more important to learn one and one, two and two and penmanship."

In addition to Brooks, the bus tour stopped at Hyde Elementary School for a presentation of a second-grade "Spring Starts Here" play and at Moon Area Middle School for a presentation by teacher Nancy Burgunder on her trip to Japan.

After lunch, the tour group saw high school students perform Shakespeare and McCormick Elementary students present on "historical hysteria."

Taking a formal "tour" of their own community isn't something that most participants had ever done before, but it's unlikely that they would have been able to see the buildings and classrooms -- and by extension their tax dollars at work -- any other way.

"We want to let the community know the good things," said Rose Varsanik, a first-year school board member who also served as tour photographer. "We need to make sure that people see the schools at this grass-roots level to see what we do."

For the most part, those on the tour had some familiarity with the schools and were already supportive. But between jokes about the lack of leg room on the school bus, they certainly appreciated the tour.

"I enjoy going from school to school -- we haven't seen the schools in how long?" said Peggy Morrison to her husband, Ken Morrison.

The Morrisons have three children and five grandchildren who attended the Moon schools, and Mrs. Morrison still has the peanut butter finger cookie recipe from when she worked in the school cafeteria.

"It's like a little family, this school district," she said.