Nation’s Youths Respond to Quake : Schools: Students from more than 200 campuses offer aid and support to L.A.-area counterparts.

In Cedar Falls, Iowa, children did chores to raise money. In Tarborog, N.C., students collected 70,000 pennies. And in Erie, Pa., students are collecting 6,600 new books.

These efforts reflect an outpouring of support from students at more than 200 schools nationwide. The youths, moved by searing scenes of destruction from the massive Northridge earthquake, have mounted fund-raising dances, book drives, pen pal writing campaigns and other efforts to aid their Los Angeles-area counterparts.

“It is the most amazing thing--since the day after the earthquake my phone has been ringing off the hook,” said Kathleen Barry, the Adopt-a-School coordinator for the L.A. Unified School District. “Almost every day I get a call from a principal or a teacher and they tell me it’s the children who have come up with the idea of helping the children of Los Angeles.”

Today, students from Fort Irwin School in Yermo, Calif., are traveling to Patrick Henry Middle School in Granada Hills to meet the children and deliver clothes and school supplies collected in the community and at a school dance. The idea came from Fort Irwin’s student council.

“The main reason we’re doing this is that in a time of need, everyone should work together,” said 14-year-old Michael Touhill, Fort Irwin’s student council co-president. “We talked about it, if something like this had happened to us, we would like other people to donate items to help us.”

In Peekskill, N.Y., the children in Amy Stewart’s first-grade class returned to school after the Jan. 17 Martin Luther King holiday and wanted to talk about the weather--the ice and snow from which they were suffering and the earthquake that slammed Los Angeles.

Stewart began by calling the school district and asking to be put in touch with a quake-damaged school that had children the same age as her class. The district matched her with Tarzana Elementary School and her students decided to write their new friends a letter to ask what they needed.

“They dictated it to me and it said, ‘We are first-graders and anyway we could help out we would love to do it.’ And then they drew pictures of what our school looks like and what our class looks like.”

At Hansen Elementary School in Cedar Falls, Iowa, children did chores to raise about $420 to send to the displaced students at Van Gogh Elementary in Granada Hills, said third-grade student teacher Elaine Johnson. The Van Gogh children have been moved to temporary quarters at Frost Middle School because of what officials fear is unstable soil at their school.

At Stocks Elementary in Tarborog, N.C., students collected 70,000 pennies for the children at Danube Avenue Elementary in Granada Hills. And in Mill Creek Township in Erie, Pa., students have a goal to collect 6,600 new books--based on the original estimated quake magnitude of 6.6.

In Muncie, Ind., Zach Rozelle, an art teacher at Wilbur E. Sutton Elementary, said his school’s letters to students at Germain Street Elementary in Chatsworth is a lesson.

“It’s an educational process as much as anything else,” Rozelle said. “The teachers are using it to teach geography and to develop social skills, things like compassion and responding to human needs.”

Because of the overwhelming interest, some schools such as Cantara Street Elementary in Reseda have received inquiries from several schools--and because so many teachers contacted Cantara and other schools directly, the LAUSD has been unable to get a total number on how many such projects are under way or how much money has been collected. On its own, the district lists about 200 such partnerships.

Cantara Principal Sandy McGuern said the principal at Blue Lakes Elementary in Miami told her the school was referred to Cantara by a Los Angeles firefighter. Students at the Florida school collected $1,000 and a box full of letters in a 10-day period. McGuern said she has also fielded calls from schools in Alice, Tex.; Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Goose Creek, S.C., and towns in New Jersey.

In suburban Washington, Rosemary Hills Primary School, with 650 kindergarten through second-graders, had collected several hundred dollars in cash and supplies by mid-week, Principal Jeff Martinez said. Martinez said students and parents at the Silver Spring, Md., school undertook a similar effort for the victims of Hurricane Andrew in Florida.

Also contributing to this story was Times staff writer James Bornemeier in Washington.