Phone-Home Idea Rates Vista School an A

Most school-age youngsters probably fear a phone call at home from school. Bad news, right?

Not at Washington Middle School in Vista. Principal Pete McHugh has asked the nearly 100 employees at the school--teachers, counselors, secretaries, custodians and cafeteria workers--to each call the parents of at least one student and to deliver good news about the child.

The school employees pick the student of their choice. The calls go home every 2 1/2 months, and the only rule is that, for the next round of calls, the employee select a different student.

“Some of our non-teaching staff people were a little skeptical about it at first, because they didn’t see it as their role to be calling students’ parents,” McHugh said. “But I want them to realize that we all have a stake in our students, no matter what their job.”

School secretary Sylvia Zaitz is not new to calling home; she is usually the bearer of bad news, because it’s her job to tell parents that their children are chronically absent or always getting in trouble. “Those calls are downers,” she said.

So, for the good-news call, Zaitz picked a sixth-grade boy who volunteers as an office assistant. “As soon as I identified myself, the mother was wary. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘What did he do now?’ She was very defensive. So I told her, ‘I just wanted to tell you what a sweet boy you have, and how very helpful and skillful he is, and how I really appreciate him.’

“You could just see her face beaming,” Zaitz said. “And I got so excited, I wrote the principal a note saying, ‘It works! It works!’ ”

The Consul Went Thataway

If you think old habits die hard, consider the dilemma faced daily in the executive offices of the Bank of San Diego, on the second floor of the Central Savings Building at 2nd and Broadway.

Hardly an hour goes by without a family of Mexicans getting off the elevator, facing the attractive Bank of San Diego logo, then heading for the nearest secretary and asking, “Donde esta el Consulado Mexicano?”

After all, the offices of the Mexican Consul General had been on the second floor of the building for a long, long time. And the phone book still gives the 225 Broadway address--never mind that the consulate moved a year ago to 1333 Front St. So it is up to Pat Edwards, the assistant to the bank president and whose desk is nearest the elevator, to tell the visitors, “No esta aqui.”

“Right away, they figure I can speak Spanish. They grin and then they really start talking. But they’ve heard just about my entire Spanish vocabulary,” Edwards says. “So I hand them a little letter in Spanish explaining that the consulate has moved.”

There are some days, she said, when the executive offices of the bank are inundated with Mexicans who figure they had come to the right place to resolve visa problems and the like. “They always come as entire families. We’ll have teenie babies and grandmas and grandpas up here. One day we counted between 40 and 50 people up here.”

“We’re praying that the new phone books come out real soon,” she said.

4-H Powerhouse

Meet Toby Lau, a 19-year-old from Valley Center who won one of nine $1,000 Reader’s Digest scholarships because of his leadership in the 4-H program.

Lau, a sophomore at Stanford University who is pursuing a degree in veterinary medicine, has been a 4-H-er for 10 years. During that period, he has helped organize the popular “Grandfather’s Farm” petting zoo at the Del Mar Fair, developed a Chinese cooking class to interest boys in cooking, organized a fishing contest, started a program designed to keep newcomers in 4-H from dropping out, helped organize pie auctions to raise money to help Valley Center firemen buy the “Jaws of Life” tool, and last year coordinated all youth livestock activities in California.

Lau said that, because he enjoys interacting with other people, he is considering going into politics.

We suppose politics and livestock have something in common. Bull, for instance.

Schussbooming Made Easy

The Palomar Community College physical education department is offering a “short-term” class in skiing.

How short? Four days--at Mammoth Mountain. The cost is $200 per person, which covers transportation, accommodations in condos and lift tickets.

Sort of a variation of how Grandpa used to trek four miles through the snow to get to school.