When Glenwood Middle School children in Jeanette Lampron's Gifted-and-Talented social studies class culled information for their original research project, it led them in a direction they didn't anticipate. Their project was no longer about research but real -- often fascinating -- people.

Glenwood Middle is down the road from the old Mount Gregory Methodist Church on Route 97 in Howard County. Because Mount Gregory will be torn down soon -- it is structurally unsafe -- church leaders approached the school about studying the building's history and its role in the African-American community.

Lampron and Gifted and Talented Program resource specialist Priscilla Geisler liked the idea. Last fall, their two classes began studying the civil rights movement to prepare for the project.

But when schoolchildren interviewed people about the church, something happened. They learned about Cooksville High School, the first secondary school for blacks in the county. When they began talking to graduates of Cooksville High, the teens were hooked.

"It was amazing that they were able to have a good school life with the little that they had," said Jennifer Glascock, 13.

Cooksville opened as a public elementary school for blacks in 1935. High school classes began later, when two rooms were added to the four-room building. All that stands on the grounds now is Mount Gregory Church and a plaque commemorating Cooksville as the first black high school in Howard County, open until 1949.

Despite poor facilities and secondhand textbooks from white schools, the all-African-American staff imbued the school with a sense of caring and community.

"They all wanted to learn. They knew that it would help them in the future," said 14-year-old Tanushka Zariwala. "The teachers would go to the students' houses and meet their parents" as a way of getting to know students better or to help.

Each child in the two social studies classes was paired with a congregant from Mount Gregory or a graduate of Cooksville. The middle-schoolers interviewed their subjects at Glenwood's television studio. Each pupil then wrote an analytical paper on the person he or she interviewed.

For most of Lampron's class, the paper was the final product. But several children went beyond the project's boundaries. They used the interviews to create a video documentary. Written interview transcripts and documents collected from a variety of sources were transformed into a book.

The video and book will be sent to county libraries and to the Center of African American Culture in Columbia, which gave schoolchildren access to documents.

Di Zou, 13, and Chris Leonavicius, 14, worked the technical end of the project, putting the movie together on a computer. To do that, they had to teach themselves Adobe Premiere 5.1 from a manual.

The 45-minute documentary features clips from the interviews. It premiered Thursday at Glenwood Middle's media center.

Interviewees, many of whom brought their families, mingled with members of the Board of Education, Howard County library staff and schoolchildren before the video began.

In his opening remarks, Principal Dan Michaels said, "They've learned how important it is to be actively aware of the history and legacy of our great county."

Cooksville alumni didn't know exactly what the children were going to do with their videotaped question-and-answer sessions -- the documentary was a surprise. While it played, they pointed at the television screen as they recognized people and places from the past.

Dorothye Craft was a substitute teacher at Cooksville. Her husband, the late Silas E. Craft Sr., was principal. "It was something a little unusual about it [the project] because kids don't usually care about what you came up through," she said.

With interview techniques and research skills, several of the youths learned that they should not take their schooling for granted. Stacey Kight, 13, coordinated documents and photographs for the book. "I didn't really appreciate my own education until I learned how hard you guys had to work to get yours," she said to Cooksville graduates.

"It was just a good point to recapture Mount Gregory and Cooksville because of their history ... and how we used that history to step up into the next period," Craft said. "It's good to know what went on before."