It was a wonderful sight.

At 7 a.m., March 29, Shoreline Center’s Shoreline Room was filled with people and their checkbooks, ready to renew emotional and financial support of public education.

Ten years, 20 years ago, that wasn’t such a hard sell. The Shoreline School District was the place to be for a family with school-age children. But more recently, a previous administration managed to spend down that emotional and financial capital.

The situation was no fault of the students, the parents or the teachers. The present administration is doing the unenviable, but required, hard work to make a decade’s worth of emotion-laden judgments in a tenth of the time.

And, just as the community set aside that still-painful past to approve a bond and levy in 2006, the community continued to look to the future at last week’s early morning breakfast, and a later luncheon, to support the Shoreline Public Schools Foundation.

The foundation has long been a strong booster of public education, a cradle of dedicated volunteers committed to the ideal that provides a societal backbone. Its grants often go directly into classrooms, funding programs run by individual teachers who are taking personal initiative to do more for their students. Such efforts and dedication are in sharp contrast to the skewed picture painted by public-education critics.

At the breakfast, foundation officers talked about the unusual $100,000 grant made this past year to help fund district programs endangered by present fiscal challenges. Indeed, there is no Pollyannaish proclivity in this community. While mindful of the past, the eyes are wide open and focused on the future, with the goal of making public education the best that it can be.

It was a wonderful sight.