Peer Lessons at Camp : Education: In program at Santa Ana school district, older teens teach children to resist drugs and gangs.

Two dozen fourth- and fifth-graders sat up straight in their tiny classroom chairs, tapping their feet to the beat of an anti-drug rap that blared from a boombox.

“I don’t drink it, I don’t smoke it,” the children sang, as their teacher, Dianna Marchese, paced back and forth before them keeping time. “I don’t use it,” they sang. “I don’t hurt my body.”

Marchese, a songwriter from Tustin, smiled and stopped the tape. “That was great,” she told the children, who had come to McFadden Intermediate School from seven elementary schools to attend a day of the Santa Ana Unified School District’s four-day PAL Camp.

“Children learn music quickly, remember it and enjoy it,” Marchese said later. “They’re more likely to remember the message if it’s in this kind of format.”

PAL--which stands for Peer Assistance Leadership--is a county-run program begun in 1980 to promote self-esteem, safety and service among students, and help them resist drugs and gangs.

The camp began two years ago as a one-day event at a local school with 250 children, said Herschel Hill, a teacher at Hoover Elementary School who is the district’s PAL leader. This year, more than 750 students are expected to attend the four days of the camp, which ends today.

Each year, PAL camps for children of different ages are held by the county Department of Education in remote mountain areas. Some Santa Ana students attend those camps, but each trip is limited to about 150 students countywide, and many children cannot afford the $225 fee for the four-day camps.

The Santa Ana camp makes lessons and games available to those who may be left out, Hill said. “This way, more of them get a chance to go to the camp.”

In the Santa Ana school district’s version of the county program, youths in high school and intermediate school learn leadership skills as they teach youngsters the dangers of drugs and gangs, leading them through exercises that build trust and friendship.

Each teen-age student supervises a group of about a dozen younger students. The teen-agers become big brothers or sisters to the children.

“At first, the kids are a little scared of you,” said Nicole Burney, 14, of Valley High School. “Then they get attached to you and don’t want to let you go.”

Grace Lopez, a lanky 16-year-old from Valley High, taught her group of children games to establish trust. When she told them about a group game in which the goal was to pick up a classmate and carry the child aloft--making the child dependent on the group for safety--she did not think they would pick her as their target.

“I was so scared at first,” Lopez said, remembering the small hands and arms that held her in the air. “But I trust them, so it was OK.”

Virginia Ramirez, a diminutive Lathrop Intermediate eighth-grader, was making her third annual visit to the camp.

“The sixth-graders listened to me even though they were bigger than me,” said Ramirez, who counsels students at her own school through PAL. She helps classmates through family stress, thoughts of suicide and other problems, Ramirez said.

Many children need peers they trust to confide in, the teen-agers said.

“For a lot of these kids, to make it in Santa Ana, they have to wake up every day and deal with problems in their life,” said Kim Phan, 18, a Saddleback High graduate who received leadership training from PAL clubs at school. “It’s easier to belong to a group like PAL, where everyone is supportive of each other, than a group like a gang.”

The younger children listen to speakers and play games that steer them away from drugs, encourage them to stay in school and teach them safety tips. They also run relays and meet children from other schools.

Marchese taught her anti-drug song in one of the camp’s four workshops. Each day, a different group of 150 to 200 children visited McFadden, and each child attended two of the four sessions.

The children’s favorite session, however, came from the Santa Ana Police Department.

Officer Steve Winston, who made his appearance in front of McFadden on a shiny blue children’s mountain bike, wearing a helmet, was popular with the children. The mustachioed officer had spent the morning telling the children stories about bicycle safety.

Winston said such meetings are important because they introduce children to law enforcement officers in a friendly way. Officers from the California Highway Patrol and Sheriff’s Department also spoke, and supplied coloring and comic books.

Business leaders told the children to stay in school, a message echoed by the teen-age mentors who said that youths in Santa Ana sometimes face strong temptations to go astray. The dropout rate in Santa Ana high schools was as high as 41% in 1985-86, but dipped to about 16% in 1991-92, primarily because of stay-in-school programs, district officials say.

“Sometimes the kids that go the wrong way are the ones that get the attention,” said Elizabeth Battersby, a Walker Elementary teacher who helped supervise the camp.

The camp, she said, rewards those who stay in school and out of trouble. “This is dropout prevention,” she said.