AMERICA’S YOUTH: A NEW IDEALISM : Youths Who Try to Make a Difference : From cleaning the Upper Newport Bay to visiting seniors in Santa Ana and helping the homeless, these local student groups are taking a look around them and getting involved.

Woodbridge High’s Stephanie Genovese views it this way: “I really think the atmosphere of teen-agers is changing.”

“Kids have a lot of social concern,” said the 18-year-old senior. “A lot of it was triggered by distress over the environment. All of us were recycling before it was mandatory in Irvine. But what also triggered it was not the hardship of our planet, but the hardship of people. We started recognizing that there are a lot of charities that need help.”

As founder and president of the Irvine Teen Community Coalition, a 120-member student group representing various campus organizations, Genovese spearheaded two citywide food drives during the school year to benefit Irvine Temporary Housing.

“Something that a lot of adults tend to overlook and something I think teen-agers can see is that it’s hard for us to make an impact--to do things--because we are under guidelines from our teachers, from our parents, from our community,” Genovese said. “However, rather than doing things separately, one thing we can do is join together to make a greater impact.”

The following are examples of other Orange County high school students who also are making an impact:

The sun poked through high clouds, creating a picture-postcard view of Upper Newport Bay, but the dozen Newport Harbor High School students tramping through the state ecological reserve on this warm Sunday morning kept their eyes to the ground.

“Oooh, no wonder McDonald’s stopped using Styrofoam,” said Laurie Firestone, picking a chunk of the white stuff out of the mud. “It’s disgusting what you find. The last time I was down here I found so much packing Styrofoam.”

“It just gets embedded in here,” said club president Laura Cazier, 17, prying more Styrofoam from a clump of dried reeds.

“You guys, it’s worse over here,” cried out another girl closer to the water’s edge.

The students--members of Green Cross, an environmental-management club at Newport Harbor High--were participating in a Back Bay cleanup the day before Earth Day in April.

Cazier and fellow senior Rachel Accord founded Green Cross in February.

“I know a lot of people are getting into the environment,” Cazier said. “We just needed somebody to care at the school. I’m not a leadership-type person, but somebody had to get these people together and organize.”

The goal of the 20-member club was to initiate a campus recycling program.

“It’s been done a couple of times, but they never lasted,” Cazier said. “We’re also trying to emphasize education about the environment and get articles in the school paper.”

Individual club members have done other Back Bay cleanups on their own, and two weeks ago a group of students hiked up Modjeska Canyon to pick up beer cans and other litter.

Club members also have circulated a petition opposing the Irvine Co.’s plans to develop the Upper Bay front above Coast Highway. Cazier and six other students even met recently with an Irvine Co. representative, but nobody’s mind was changed.

“We still don’t want it to be developed; we think it’s environmentally valuable as a wildlife refuge,” said Cazier, who plans to major in biological science in college.

Walking along the bay front, Cazier ran through a shopping list of changes she’d like to see enacted to improve the environment, including increasing mass transit, recycling, and modifying cars so they emit fewer pollutants.

Helping keep the Upper Bay clean is a club priority. On cleanups, members pick up cans, bottles, food wrappers, car tires and car parts. One student said she even found 13 syringes embedded in the mud. And, of course, there’s the ubiquitous Styrofoam.

“I like seeing the Back Bay beautiful,” said senior Fabian Rousset, 17, a club member who admits to having occasionally littered himself. “Everybody has. I think the best thing is for the public to know more, to come out here and see what happens.”

Indeed, after only half an hour, half a dozen large garbage bags were already bulging with litter. But the students hadn’t even made a dent.

“It’s frustrating, especially when you look at how little area we’ve covered,” Cazier said. “There’s so much Styrofoam left.”

Standing outside the Royale Convalescent Hospital in Santa Ana, 17-year-old Zulkiflee Lep was waiting for another carload of fellow Century High School students to arrive.

Lep and two dozen members of the school’s community service club, Santa Ana Volunteer Youth (SAVVY), were making their monthly visit to the convalescent facility a few miles from school.

Smiling shyly, the soft-spoken Cambodian refugee said, “Doing this makes me feel great because some of them are so lonely and they don’t have family. We want them to know they’re not going to be forgotten and they’re always going to be with us.”

Lep has been SAVVY’s president for three years. The 150-member campus club, designated as one of President Bush’s “Thousand Points of Light,” provides ongoing food and clothing distribution to needy families in the school. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, the students feed and clothe about 1,000 children in the community.

And once a month, club members visit the mostly elderly residents of the Royale Convalescent Hospital.

The young people never show up empty-handed. They have brought balloons, holiday room decorations, candy and, on this visit, cookies for the residents.

Not that they need an icebreaker. Since starting the visits two years ago, the students and residents have become friends, and what were once 20-minute stays now stretch into an hour.

Inside the lobby, nearly a dozen women in wheelchairs were lined up to greet the swarm of young people who immediately began passing out cookies and chatting with the residents.

Lep, however, headed down the hall to see his friend John.

Poking his head into one of the rooms, Lep announced: “John’s not in his room.” Heading back down the hall, he said, “Usually I meet him outside.”

As Lep rounded a corner, 73-year-old John Logan wheeled up in his electric wheelchair.

“How are you?” the grinning boy said as he shook hands with Logan.

“Just great!” said a beaming Logan, who has lived at the convalescent hospital four years.

“He’s been wonderful,” Logan said of Lep. “It’s like another world to see the kids. They’re so friendly, so open, so lovable.”

Back in Logan’s room, Logan and Lep talked about school and Lep’s life in Cambodia.

Lep arrived in the United States eight years ago with his father, one brother and one sister. Lep’s mother and three sisters remain in Cambodia.

On his way to visit another of his friends, Lep, who plans to major in mechanical engineering in college, explained his involvement in Santa Ana Volunteer Youth.

“I feel like some part of the community is poor, and if we help them we can make a difference in the community,” he said. “We make them happy. We make friends with them. I feel people should help other people.”

Glancing at a group of students chatting to the women in wheelchairs in the lobby, Lep grinned.

“I just love to come here because they’re so lonely and when we come they’re so happy,” he said. “They ask us, ‘When are you going to come back?’ ”

Several whistles and whoops greeted the familiar gray van that pulled up near the General Services Agency Building in downtown Santa Ana.

Within seconds, Allison Martin and four other Dana Hills High School students were passing out sack lunches to the more than 100 homeless men and a few women lined up on the sidewalk.

“Grab one and move along,” said one man in the middle of the line who knew the ritual.

Five minutes later, the last sack lunch had been handed out and the students and two adult volunteers were ready to move on to their third and final stop of the afternoon.

“It goes by really fast,” said Martin, 17, president of the Dana Hills High School chapter of Street People in Need (SPIN), an Orange County volunteer organization that feeds and clothes the homeless.

Added Martin, who had her hand kissed by one homeless man at their first stop in front of the Salvation Army: “Some are so thankful and gracious and others, I think, are embarrassed and they don’t even look you in the eye. They just want to get in and out as quick as they can.”

Martin started the 45-member student chapter of SPIN last fall after giving a talk in her speech class on the volunteer work her mother, Gillian, does for the organization.

“I just wanted to do it because I wanted to see the kids get involved and aware of the homeless situation in Orange County,” she said. “The kids in our school are always interested in showing some kind of concern about the homeless and social problems, but they don’t know how to make a difference or where to start.”

Once a month, members of the student chapter take over one of SPIN’s Tuesday or Thursday sack-lunch deliveries to the homeless in Santa Ana.

Using donated food and food bought from cash donations from fellow students, chapter members meet after school to prepare 200 to 350 sack lunches--each sack contains a sandwich, cookies, an apple and a Hi-C drink box. They then rendezvous at a church in Newport Beach before driving into Santa Ana.

“It’s a lot of hard work, and a couple of days before we’re about to do it, it’s stressful thinking about meeting the deadline,” Martin said. “But after it’s over, you know the gratitude is there and it makes you want to do it all over again.”

Acknowledging that “I’m very well off and never had to worry about anything like that,” Martin said, “my conscious is too big” not to do something.

“Ever since I was little I’ve always been trying to think of ways to help the less fortunate. It makes me feel good knowing that I’m making a difference.”

Although Martin will be taking pre-law classes at the University of San Diego in the fall, the SPIN chapter at Dana Hills High School won’t end when she leaves.

Shauna Pina, a freshman, will take over as president in September.

“She’s really going to take off with it,” Martin said. “She has a lot of ideas. She’s spunky and exactly what we need to do even more.”

It’s 10:15 on a Friday night, and Mission Viejo High School senior Keri Hayes normally would be at a movie or a party with friends.

Instead, Hayes, senior Amy Watson and junior David Cullum are sitting at a conference table in the basement of Saddleback Memorial Medical Center waiting for the phone to ring.

The threesome is the volunteer SafeRides team for the evening.

Mission Viejo High School is part of a nationwide network of 750 high schools participating in the anti-drunk driving support program designed to help reduce the number of teen-age alcohol-related deaths and injuries.

Nationwide, more than 43% of all 16- to 20-year-old deaths result from motor vehicle crashes, nearly half of which are alcohol-related, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. An estimated 3,374 people in that age group died in alcohol-related crashes nationwide in 1989.

And so each Friday and Saturday, between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., three student volunteers from Mission Viejo High staff the phone at Saddleback Hospital.

Some nights the phone never rings. Other nights volunteers have fielded as many as six calls. About half of the callers have been under the influence; the others are simply stranded and need a ride home.

Spread out on the table in front of Hayes, Watson and Cullum are their supplies for the evening: a street map of South County, a cellular phone, a first-aid kit and a plastic bowl they jokingly refer to as the “barf bucket.”

To pass the time, the student volunteers--and one adult, who provides food and stability--usually watch TV or play Pictionary or cards. Some even do their homework. If a call comes in on this night, Hayes will serve as driver and Cullum as navigator.

The alcohol-related death of the brother of one of her friends is part of the reason Hayes volunteered for the program.

“There are other organizations against drunk driving,” she said, “but I felt like a lot of them are mostly just words: They say they’re against it, and they tell the kids, ‘Don’t drink and drive.’

“I think this program acknowledges the fact that not every teen-ager in high school is going to obey what you tell them to do and that there are some people who are going to drink no matter what.

“I feel like, OK, they’re going to drink. I don’t agree with it, but it doesn’t mean I should stand back and let them kill themselves.”

Added Hayes, who also volunteers at a school for mentally disabled children: “I just believe that if I don’t take any action to show that I really believe that, then it’s just my thoughts and I’m not really taking part in helping better what’s happening.”