Kids Who Are Heard but Not Seen : Two free telephone programs, one serving Irvine and another all of Orange County, provide home-alone children a sympathetic ear during their after-school hours.

Hour to hour, day to day, what’s the problem that vexes Orange County elementary school kids most?

Don’t get too analytical. It isn’t drugs or crime or violence or money or any of the Top 10 miseries of the adult world. Sit around Linda Zuba’s office for a while and you’ll likely conclude that the monkey on most little kids’ backs is boredom.

It’s 3 p.m.; school’s been out for a while; Mom and/or Dad is still at work, and the increasingly typical latchkey child is home alone, rattling around in the house with time on his hands and no one to talk to.

That’s where Zuba and her staff come in. They run a service called Irvine Kid Phone, a combination telephonic baby-sitter, counseling service, sympathetic ear and encyclopedic store of boredom-banishing activities. Every school day, from 2 to 6 p.m., the three lines in the small office in the City of Irvine community services complex are run by both community volunteers and UCI interns who offer lonely children the comfort of a human connection.

In operation for about six years as part of the Irvine community services department, Kid Phone has benefited from an aggressive marketing campaign and today handles an estimated 7,000 calls a year, said Zuba, the project’s coordinator.

Throughout the year, Zuba tries to visit each of the 21 elementary schools in the Irvine Unified School District, makes a presentation to the students at each stop and hands out brochures and bookmarks with Kid Phone’s number (756-9276) printed on them.

And many respond. One of the calls on a recent afternoon from a young boy was, Zuba said, typical. Listening only to the side of the conversation carried on by UCI intern Elaine Latona, it was possible to get nearly the whole story:

“Hi, who’s this? What can I do for you today? You’re home alone? You’re bored? Let’s see, do you like sports? How about animals? Well, do you want to make stuff or do you want something that you can do outside? Well, have you ever made a collage? Or a kite?”

Latona, 24, a psychology and social behavior major, could tell him how to do both projects, thanks to hundreds of index cards contained in a handful of plastic file boxes on the table in front of her. Inside are dozens of jokes, easy snack recipes (“potato chip cookies” is one), game and craft instructions (such as how to make your own soap bubbles) and stories of varying lengths that can be read over the phone.

Mostly, however, the staff is there to listen. Volunteer Lori Parmentier, 35, fielded a call from a 7-year-old girl whose classmate had recently been hit by a car.

Parmentier: “She’s in the hospital? You haven’t been able to see her, though? And you sent her a candy-gram! That was so nice of you! Really? Boy, she must have been really brave. It sounds like she’s doing better.”

“We get such a wide variety of calls,” Zuba said. “You never know what’s coming next. You get kids who are bored and need activity ideas; others just need company, or they want to talk about school or who they like or who they’re mad at. They might have problems that need referrals elsewhere, but we don’t get a lot of those.

“Friend problems are common. That’s so hard for a lot of younger kids to handle because their friends are their whole world at that time.”

A few miles away, in a room at Western Medical Center in Santa Ana, Mai Vu is waiting to answer what is likely to be a similar call. Vu, 17, a high school student from Orange, is one of two volunteers who answer the single telephone that is the focus of the hospital’s PhoneFriend program ((714) 953-5437).

PhoneFriend, a national organization based in Cleveland, offers franchises throughout the country. Western Med’s program has been in operation for about a year. Unlike Kid Phone, which targets schoolchildren in Irvine, PhoneFriend is advertised throughout the county and takes calls from many different areas.

However, said Judith Freyer, the program’s coordinator, marketing of PhoneFriend in Orange County has been spotty and word has been slow to get around to schools. Calls come in at the rate of three to five a day, she said.

Still, the issues, the poignancy and the methods remain the same.

“We provide them with contact, adult contact,” Freyer said. “The program doesn’t condone kids being at home alone, but it does address reality. The kids need someone available to them. They’re more vulnerable today, and there’s more stress in their lives. We’re in no way trying to undermine parents. The parents can prepare them, but nevertheless they’re still home alone. Very often we’ll say something like ‘If your mom or dad were at home, what would they do about this?’ ”

*

Like the Irvine operation, PhoneFriend equips its staff with a card catalogue of jokes, activities and stories. However, Freyer said, the listeners sometimes have to wing it.

“For instance,” she said, “we once got a call from a child who thought there was a ghost in the house. I don’t think there’s anything in the card catalogue about the supernatural.” The staffs of both Kid Phone and PhoneFriend are rarely brought up short, however. The idea, Zuba said, is not so much to be encyclopedic as receptive.

“You need to be open-minded and accepting,” she said. “We’re listening-oriented, not advice-oriented. Most of our people tend to be college-aged who intend to go into counseling or teaching, and they’re very eager to learn. But we’ve had retired people who have been great, too. Age doesn’t matter as much as personality.”

Kid Phone has 18 staffers who work various hours. PhoneFriend has only two--Vu and a UCI student, but Freyer said that there are plans to expand.

Meanwhile, Vu, who wants to be a psychologist, said she loves the job.

“It’s a great opportunity for me, and it’s a paying job,” she said. “I like it when the phone rings. It’s not just that I’m helping someone; I really like to talk to the kids out there. At first I was kind of timid, scared that I wouldn’t say the right thing. But I’m much more comfortable now. I think that I can see where these kids are coming from.”

One of the most satisfying aspects of the job, say the staffers, is the occasional personal relationship that can develop between them and frequent callers, some of whom ask for them by name. Vu has only been working for PhoneFriend for about six months, but already, she said, she has established a friendly relationship with a blind girl who calls “every so often.”

At the Kid Phone desk, some callers are old friends. A handful of children, Zuba said, have called the service regularly for nearly five years.

“We’ve kind of watched them grow up,” Zuba said, “and I’ve really liked what I’ve seen. Some of them have really done well. There was one little girl who called and at first was very shy but who over the years became very outgoing, very verbal. I always love to hear from her.”