Young People Finding Summer Work Scarce : Teen-agers and those in their early 20s struggle to land the few low-skill, low-paying jobs that are out there.

Martin Toumaian will make popcorn. Sara Gregory will teach swimming. And Amy Means will hurtle through the air upside down.

All three are taking part in an annual American ritual, the summer job. Toumaian, 18, Gregory, 16, and Means, 20, are among thousands of young people now exiting schools and entering a panoply of low-skill, low-paying jobs, of which working in movie theaters, teaching swimming and testing roller coasters are just a few examples.

They are the lucky ones. At least they found a summer job. Toumaian works at Pacific Theatres’ Northridge movie complex. Gregory works at the East Valley YMCA in North Hollywood, and Means is a ride foreman at Six Flags Magic Mountain theme park in Valencia.

Despite signs of economic recovery in the San Fernando Valley area, other young people will have a tough time finding summer work. Youth unemployment, always two to three times the overall unemployment rate, is close to a five-year high.

In California, the unemployment rate for workers 16 to 19 years old was 24% in April, and it usually goes up another 3% to 5% in summer. And earthquake damage has temporarily shut down the Northridge Fashion Center mall, wiping out about 2,500 jobs, according to Lloyd Miller, mall general manager. Many of those jobs were retail posts traditionally held by younger workers.

Many young people who do land jobs will find them at summer camps, restaurants, retail stores, day-care centers, swimming pools and amusement parks. At Six Flags Magic Mountain and Universal Studios Hollywood, seasonal hiring is already well under way. Both theme parks will add about the same number of summer workers this year as last--about 2,000 at Universal Studios and 1,600 at Magic Mountain.

The vast majority of these workers will be under 24 years old and will earn between $5 and $7 per hour. Sharonda Picquet, 22, a Palmdale resident who is a College of the Canyons student, is working as a waitress at Mooseburger Lodge restaurant at Magic Mountain this summer.

Picquet, who hopes to become a lawyer, said her Magic Mountain job is marred by that common hazard of summer work--an embarrassing uniform. Despite having to dress like a Boy Scout, she said it’s a vast improvement over her previous summer job at a motocross racetrack snack bar.

Co-worker Josh Seat, 23, of Valencia, a graduate student at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, will earn $7 an hour as a “greeter,” who welcomes customers at the Magic Mountain restaurant and sings to them with the restaurant staff several times a day. The money he earns this summer will help him offset a 75% cutback in his scholarship funds, which have been curtailed as a result of the earthquake, he said.

Seat hopes to become a filmmaker, and he needs money to complete a film he has produced--a thriller set in the Magic Mountain area. “There are not a lot of jobs that would keep my interest,” said Seat. “I thought this one would.”

For many who do find a summer job, using it to make a dent in college costs is getting harder. The U. S. Census Bureau says that median income for 15- to 24-year-olds has basically stayed flat in the past decade when adjusted for inflation. At the same time, the cost of attending college has soared. Tuition and fees for a semester at Cal State Northridge, for example, has more than doubled in the past decade when adjusted for inflation. And tuition at CSUN will go up another 10% next fall.

Students who want to work their way through college must be as driven as 22-year-old Monica Johnson, a senior at UCLA who wants to be a psychiatrist.

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During school, Johnson works three jobs, doing lab work, dorm management and campus vending. Johnson recently auditioned for a summer job as a Universal Studios tour guide.

Johnson spent a long morning auditioning in a sweltering hotel meeting room with dozens of other would-be tour guides last month. Failure of the air-conditioning system added to the discomfort of these job seekers, who were asked to give impromptu speeches before a roomful of rival applicants. “I have to keep working my other jobs, and I thought this one would give me more fun,” said Johnson. She didn’t get that tour guide job, but she is still being considered for other positions at Universal Studios.

The competition for just about any summer job is fierce.

Harold Gordon, senior director of Camp Kinneret Day Camp and Sunny Skies Day Camp in Agoura Hills, said he is getting 10 applicants for each of 100 camp counseling and other camp staff jobs he adds each summer.

At the Career Center at Cal State Northridge, only about local 30 employers, down from 60 last year, turned out for the college’s yearly summer job fair this spring, said Ann Morey, CSUN career counselor. Morey blames the low turnout on the earthquake and the closure of the Northridge Fashion Center, which won’t reopen until late this year at the earliest.

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One employer of youths from poorer families is the federally funded Summer Youth Employment and Training Program, which each summer hires people ages 14 to 21 for a variety of low-level jobs in local government or for nonprofit agencies. The federal program pays $5.47 an hour. The program starts in July and will employ about 15,000 people through the city of Los Angeles, and another 8,000 through the Los Angeles County Private Industry Council.

But each year, the program is overwhelmed with applicants, said George Flores, program manager of youth programs for the county. Typically, more than twice as many young people apply as there are spaces in the program.

Despite the program’s popularity, there is a growing feeling that a summer job is not as valuable as it once was. Studies have shown that, in the case of the federal summer jobs program, summer work alone does little to improve a young person’s chances of staying employed later in life, said Tom Smith, vice president of Public/Private Ventures in Philadelphia, a nonprofit agency that has studied youth employment.

So last year, Congress retooled the federal program to shift the emphasis away from traditional summer work and give more weight to education. For the first time in Los Angeles this summer, program participants who test below grade levels in certain skills must attend school two hours per day in addition to their outside jobs. They will get paid for both, said Earl Jones of the city’s Department of Community Development.

Not all the summer jobs news is grim. There are strong indications that the Valley’s economy is rebounding, and that can mean a growth in temporary jobs, which is good news for college-age workers.

“Some of the very best temporaries are students. . . . Employers need multi-skilled people, and it’s the young who are multi-skilled,” said Iris Bogard, president of Bogard Temps Inc. of Encino, which provides office help. During the summer, about 20% of her temporary workers are students on break from college. Bogard said her company’s sales grew to $2.7 million in 1993 from $1.6 million the year before, and she expects to do even better this year.

Jon Speier, 21, of Woodland Hills is returning to work for Bogard Temps again this summer. Speier worked in customer service, bill collections, and fraud investigations for a cellular phone company, and it wants him back. Speier, a student and sprinter on the track team at Azusa Pacific University, said he earns money from a summer job so that he doesn’t have to work while in school and can instead focus on running.

Internships may also be a bright spot in this summer’s job market. Mary Williams, a CSUN counselor, said the stronger economy nationally means summer internships for college students are up this year. The CSUN career center has about three times as many companies advertising internships locally and elsewhere this year compared with two years ago.

Despite this, students say competition for summer internships is fierce. “There are so many students at CSUN and there are not very many jobs,” said a disconsolate Jeffrey Jones, a 22-year-old accounting major, displaying the handful of listings for accounting internships he was jotting down at the center.

As tough as it is for college students to find summer jobs, those of high school age have even a tougher time. Summer internships are generally restricted to college students, and many temporary services only hire workers 18 and over. The same is true of security-guard services and some summer camps, both heavy users of student labor.

Erick Dominguez, 16, a serious, soft-spoken Reseda High School student, wants to help support his parents and his two siblings. His mother is a housekeeper, his father is a sewing machine operator, and they need help making ends meet. Erick said he would take any job, if he could just find one.

He has applied at several fast-food restaurants. “They say they are not hiring, or they don’t hire you at 16,” he said. “I thought it was going to be easy to find a job. But it’s not easy.”

To help, some public schools are tailoring programs to give high school students more skills they need to find jobs. Starting this fall, most Los Angeles district high schools will shift a required class to the ninth grade from 10th grade that teaches resume writing and various job interview skills to help prepare students earlier for work.

Such changes are welcomed by employers, who complain that that younger people are ill-prepared for the workplace. “They don’t seem to be getting it,” said Scott Nostaja, senior vice president of administration at Universal Studios Hollywood.

Nostaja gets applications where the penmanship is so bad he can’t read what they have written, and complains that during interviews some job applicants’ only response is to mumble yes or no. Gary J. Vien , who does much of the hiring for Magic Mountain, said some young applicants arrive with bare feet and beachwear for interviews. Others bring a gaggle of friends.

Most young people, though, will find jobs through their own trials and errors, like Sara Gregory, the 16-year-old swimming instructor, who attends North Hollywood High School, and her friend Marcia Muller, 15.

The pair cornered jobs as swimming instructors and lifeguards at the East Valley YMCA in North Hollywood earning about $5.50 per hour, an achievement they owe to strong arms, and a lifeguard certificate earned by both this spring.

Neither take their good fortune for granted, though. “All my friends (say), ‘Oh my God, you are so lucky to have a job,’ ” said Gregory.