Theft of Kids' Onions Has Happy Ending

What started out as a lousy lesson for a fifth-grade class in Maine has turned into a nice one instead. As the Morning Sentinel reports, the lousy part is that somebody stole all 100 onions planted by the class. The kids were going to give them to the school cafeteria and to a local homeless shelter, but they discovered their onion patch plundered upon returning to school after the Labor Day weekend. The nice part? The story got national attention, and now donors have dropped off lots more onions than the kids planted in the first place.

"So, this is the lesson the kids are learning," says teacher Mary Dunn. "It renews their belief in human nature, which is what disasters do. Not that disasters are good, but when something goes wrong and you hang in there, something good comes of it." This, weirdly, is not the only story about the theft of student-grown produce with a happy ending. In Portales, NM, somebody made off with all the pumpkins from a pumpkin patch planted by preschoolers. The kids lost four pumpkins, reports AP, but locals who heard about the story have already donated 10, and more are on the way. (More onions stories.)