For reasons that need no elaboration, there is a great, desperate hunger for good news about American schoolchildren. Here’s nourishment:

The eighth-grade pupils at Boothbay Regional Middle School held an art auction recently. They raised about $1,000. Not for new basketball uniforms or to throw themselves an end-of-year party, but to free slaves.

It started when social-studies teacher Rae Pelletier led her class into a unit on Africa. A routine exploration of that continent’s history and culture soon turned deadly serious when Internet research turned up information on the active slave trade that exits today in war-torn Sudan. And on the active movement in schools throughout this country to do something about it.

The entire Boothbay Harbor school joined in, creating and selling art based upon African styles. The proceeds could have bought a lot of pizza and soft drinks. Instead, it will buy, at $50 a human being, the freedom of 20 Sudanese.

Perhaps someone like Abuk Deng Akuei, a girl in her early teens who was taken from her Sudan village in a raid by a militia group in 1977 and sold into slavery. When her owner wasn’t raping, mutilating or beating her, he kept her penned with his other livestock.

With the Massachusetts-based American Anti-Slavery Group providing the money and the Swiss-based relief organization Christian Solidarity making the transaction, Abuk’s freedom was bought early this year and she was returned home.

Schools got involved in this remarkable movement last year when an Aurora, Colo., elementary began fund drives that so far have raised $50,000. At least 100 schools around the country have since joined the effort: a junior high in Deep River, Conn., held a dance; sixth-grade students in Miami sold candy; Boothbay kids turned social studies into social action.

American Anti-Slavery was founded in 1993 by Charles Jacobs, whose successful career as a management consultant suddenly seemed irrelevant when he read of the burgeoning slave trade that exists today: Human rights organizations say millions of slaves are sold around the world every year — as prostitutes in Thailand, as charcoal workers in Brazil, as brick kiln operators in Pakistan, as bonded farmers in India, as war loot in Sudan. In Africa, Jacob’s group works closely with Christian Solidarity, which does the dangerous work of actually dealing with the slave traders.

In a way that is both somewhat understandable and altogether puzzling, many human-rights organizations, including UNICEF, oppose this movement, saying it merely encourages slave trade by creating a market. In a narrow sense, they are correct. Jacobs counters by saying the goal is not to end this abomination one deal at a time, but to raise awareness and outrage to such a level that the world can no longer look the other way.

Jacobs is more correct. Congress last week heard him testify on slavery in North Africa. The American Anti-Slavery Group now has chapters in major cities throughout the country. The school component is mushrooming. The world is paying attention. Not at all incidentally, more than 800 Sudanese slaves have been freed.

It’s been 150 years since Harriet Beecher Stowe, with one book, made abolition an imperative in this country. Thousands of schoolkids, like those in Boothbay Harbor, can do the same worldwide with dances, candy sales and art auctions. At the same time, their selfless efforts can emancipate the terrorized American psyche from slavery of a different kind.