LAGUNA BEACH : Catholic Students Give Needy a Hand

Mashed potatoes may not require great culinary skill. But Alvira Luckey, a resident at the Friendship Shelter for the homeless here, was still talking about how good they tasted a day after a group of Santa Margarita High School students showed up to do the peeling and cooking.

Luckey and 24 other men and women at the shelter recently were also looking forward to the noodles and meat sauce that two sophomore boys from Santa Margarita had cooked in the shelter’s kitchen.

“It shows us that it does not matter what age you are to care about others,” said the 38-year-old woman. “You might expect that from adults or a charity organization but not from school kids. It is encouragement to us to get up and try all over again.”

Increasingly, students from Santa Margarita and other Catholic high schools in Orange County are appearing wherever there is a need for volunteers to feed the poor, assist the handicapped, visit the elderly or provide manpower to run jog-a-thons and other fund-raisers for charity.

And they have won recognition for their efforts. For several years Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana and Cornelia Connely High School in Anaheim have consistently received awards from Disneyland for student service.

While Catholic schools long have supported student community outreach programs, school officials acknowledge that the recent increase in student participation has been helped by a graduation requirement that all students spend a specified number of hours in these activities.

Father Martin Benzoni, the campus ministry chaplain at Santa Margarita High School, which draws Catholic students from throughout South County, acknowledged that selling the importance of community service to youth isn’t always easy.

“Some do not see the value of it, especially in Orange County where the main concern is: ‘How far can I get ahead,’ ” he said. “We are a minority message.”

Since Santa Margarita High School opened four years ago, all students have been required to do at least 80 hours of community service before graduation. Similar graduation requirements have been enforced at Mater Dei for six years and at Cornelia Connely for four years.

Greg Garczynski, Christian service coordinator at Santa Margarita, said the experience of working with the poor and disabled is an “eye-opener” for the students, most of whom come from middle- to upper-income families and live in the county’s newly built subdivisions that are isolated from many of the harsher realities of life.

“They have never seen neighborhoods without running water or paved streets or groomed yards,” he said.

But that changes when Garczynski takes a group of about 50 students to Tijuana, where they pass out rice and beans to people living at the city dump.

Also, Garczynski said that on alternate Tuesdays he loads up his van with students to go to Santa Ana to help distribute food, job flyers and hygiene kits to the street people or to cook meals at the Friendship Center in Laguna Beach.

Similarly, Sister Beth Muir, director of community service at Cornelia Connely High School, an all-girls academy, said many of her students are initially frightened by the idea of working with the elderly or handicapped. To alleviate their fears, she organizes group work programs.

Earlier this month, she said, a group of 31 girls painted a house in one day for an elderly woman who otherwise couldn’t have afforded to have it done. By the end of the work, she said, the girls and the woman had become fast friends.

“A lot of them just need a little extra push,” agreed Sue Spinner, who directs the Christian service program at Mater Dei.

Scott Jacoby, who next month will graduate from Santa Margarita High School, said that although he fulfilled his 80-hour service requirement in the summer of his sophomore year by working as a counselor at a camp for the mentally handicapped, he returned to the camp the following summer and will do so again this year.

“I probably wouldn’t have done it if hadn’t been for the requirement,” Jacoby admitted. But he said he has enjoyed the “intimate feeling” of becoming a friend to the campers and “seeing the smiles on their faces.”