Real-life Santa Claus

Danette Goulet

NEWPORT-MESA -- When a sick little girl in Costa Mesa looks under the

tree on Christmas morning, she will find that Santa has answered her

letter.

On her way to the hospital earlier this month, a third-grade student at

Whittier Elementary School who has undergone several major surgeries

entrusted her school nurse with a very important letter.

That letter asked Santa for her very own computer. It was signed with a

series of seven hearts.

After reading the letter, the nurse hand-delivered it to what she hoped

might be Santa’s Workshop.

That workshop was the Newport-Mesa Unified School District maintenance

and operations department.

When department head Eric Jetta read the letter, his heart melted.

“I talked to the guys and asked if there were any surplus parts or

donated equipment,” Jetta said.

He realized that they could not give her anything that belonged to the

district, but felt there must be a way.

“When something wants to work out -- it will,” he said.

After hearing the story and reading the handwritten letter, four

employees began to stay late each night.

They had an Apple computer that had been damaged in a flood. They

scrounged up an old dot-matrix printer that was donated and would never

be used in the district. Odds and ends were found to repair the old

computer.

Those four employees -- Mack Harris, Cindy Tran, Michael Jones and Tim

Harris -- began to rebuild.

“You have to take the whole thing apart and make sure all the components

work,” Jones said. “In this case, there was a lot of extra repair work.”

The work was split among them, as each of the four employees has their

own specialty, Jones said.

“There’s always a goodwill policy,” he said. “You can’t have enough good

will.”

It is because of that sentiment that a little girl’s face will light up

come Christmas morning.