Hands off kids' charity.

Byline: Bob Welch / The Register-Guard

KYLEE PANTER - all 2 pounds, 7 ounces of her - came struggling into the world on Feb. 18 at Sacred Heart Medical Center.

The daughter of Scott and Melissa Panter of Springfield, she was born 11 weeks early because of complications with the pregnancy. Now, Kylee weighs more than 5 pounds and is headed home soon.

That's thanks in part to a bunch of wild and crazy high school guys who, through the 10-year-old Kids Helping Kids program, have helped raise more than $1.1 million for Sacred Heart Medical Center's neonatal intensive care unit and for other local infant and child entities.

Each year at nearly two dozen area high schools, the boys dance, sing, joke and generally act bizarre as part of the "Mr. (Your High School Mascot Here)" pageants. They spread awareness about infant care. They organize fund-raisers and, frankly, make gobs of money that gets funneled through the local chapter of the Children's Miracle Network, which oversees the program.

But the good times may be over.

What's emerged as one of the area's most successful fund-raising efforts - it brought in a record $352,000 last year - is being challenged by some school administrators who, amid tough financial times, believe that schools should get a larger piece of the pie. (They already get a piece.)

"We can't continue to help everyone else and not help ourselves," Churchill High School Principal John Sappington says.

Like others, the Eugene School District is facing massive budget cuts. "At some point we need to look at ourselves," Sappington says. "Are we being greedy? Yeah, we have a right to be. We have some pretty desperate needs."

At South Eugene High School, some parents and faculty are grumbling about whether, as Principal Jerry Henderson says, "we should be involved in fund-raising efforts for a corporation (PeaceHealth) that could buy and sell the school district without notice."

Though you'd hope folks could put needy children above politics, you can't fault such administrators for looking for new money veins; schools are struggling. But if they've got the right question (how can we raise more money?), they've come up with the wrong answer (crash someone else's party).

"This could kill the program," says Karen Martin, whose middle school-aged son, C.J., came up with the pageant idea back in 1992-1993.

AT A MEETING between pageant administrators and school principals last January, virtually all agreed that students were spending too much time on the annual event, and that it needed to be kept in perspective.

They also discussed divvying up the money and agreed that the current approach works: Student pageant coordinators at each school choose where their school's share goes from a menu of about two dozen local child-oriented entities - including their own school-based health clinics.

So, Martin, a volunteer with Kids Helping Kids, and Debi White, director of the Children's Miracle Network at Sacred Heart, were surprised by a story and editorial in the Feb. 15 issue of The Axe, South Eugene High's student newspaper. A student-written editorial, which Henderson says doesn't necessarily reflect the administration's point of view, said the fund-raiser "should benefit South more than PeaceHealth."

In the other article, Henderson, who says his views were accurately reflected, questioned the Children's Miracle Network and Kids Helping Kids. "The fact that we could even suggest that our students should have a stronger voice with how the money is spent seems to be shaking the foundations of these organizations."

Martin believes that the success of the kids' fund raising has some administrators licking their chops. "Our success is our failure," Martin says. "We wouldn't be having this conversation if we weren't doing so well."

If part of the problem might be that principals and pageant administrators haven't met since January - they're scheduled to Wednesday - part of it, too, is that some are losing focus over what this is all about.

Kids Helping Kids isn't about money, it's about high schoolers rising to the challenge of helping someone other than themselves - a particularly noble gesture that our schools should be encouraging, not discouraging.

"This is a program that benefits people outside these kids' world," Martin says. "That's the magic. It's about life in a neonatal intensive care unit that they don't relate to. But when those boys walk out after seeing those babies, they are different human beings. And they say, `My God, I can make a difference.' '

Not everyone sees the magic. In The Axe article, student government adviser Ann Hettick was quoted as saying some at South believe boys in the pageant are used as pawns and their tours of the neonatal unit are ways to exploit their emotions so they'll "want to help them (the babies)."

Having known such boys and read stories of their experiences, I can only shake my head at such small-mindedness. In a world that preaches "me, me, me," seeing a teen-ager humbled by a tiny human life - to "want to help them" - is nothing short of glorious.

Ben Matson, the 1997 "Mr. Axeman," says being part of Kids Helping Kids wasn't the highlight of his senior year. "It was the highlight of my entire high school experience. I don't see the logic behind taking away from such a good thing. ... It's like saying: We should give to charity, but we think we should be the charity."

Some argue that the schools provide the resources - venue and student energy - for these fund-raisers, so why shouldn't they get a cut? OK, should we apply that same logic to the hundreds of people who volunteer to help the schools? They're a resource - a huge resource. Should they get a cut?

Besides, the schools do benefit financially from their involvement in the fund-raiser. Kids Helping Kids makes a yearly donation to the area's six school-based health clinics; this year that was $5,000 - the complete amount schools requested on their "wish lists." In addition, the Children's Miracle Network gave the Eugene School District a $6,200 check last December for an emergency need. Sacred Heart, meanwhile, donates $100,000 annually to the school clinics.

Beyond that, though, each school's student pageant coordinators are allowed to choose where their money goes. South could spend all of its money on its own school-based health clinic as long as it establishes that the need is there and the amount didn't include salaries or administrative costs, which Children's Miracle Network doesn't fund. "It's the kids' program," Martin says.

Here's the rub, though: If schools start siphoning off large amounts, the original point of the fund-raiser will be lost. "There's no way we could reach out as far as we do into the community without that money," White says.

And Martin worries that some schools may be eyeing money for more than their health clinics. At issue, she says, is trust - that those involved remember what this is all about.

You can't help but wonder if this would even be an issue if Kids Helping Kids had raised, say, $35,200 last year instead of $352,000. You wonder, too, if this would be an issue if it didn't involve Sacred Heart, everybody's favorite 10,000-pound civic gorilla.

For once can we, as a community, see beyond the politics? Can we remember what's really important here? If not visualizing world peace or even Eugene peace, can we at least visualize Kylee Panter and the others?

Sure, we should be deeply concerned about our schools' funding problems, but those problems need to be solved in Salem, not by siphoning off money intended to, in part, help preemies stay alive. And if administrators truly believe that such fund-raisers are an answer, what's preventing them from starting their own?

Schools trying to benefit themselves through the Kids Helping Kids fund-raiser are like the drowning swimmer who, panicked, lunges atop a fellow swimmer in a desperate attempt to be saved. The result? Both wind up drowning.

What a sad, and unnecessary, lesson for the children watching from shore.

Bob Welch can be reached by calling 338-2354 or by e-mail at [e-mail].