PROGRAM GETS CHARITY COOKING; HART HIGH TO FEED AREA NEEDY.

Byline: Mary Schubert Daily News Staff Writer

In kitchens all over Santa Clarita, students and parents are cooking turkeys, preparing side dishes and baking desserts to feed the multitudes at Hart High School's annual demonstration of yuletide spirit.

Saturday will mark the seventh holiday dinner the campus has prepared for needy members of the community. The Hart High cafeteria will be decorated to match this year's theme, Winter Wonderland, and participants will receive not only a home-cooked meal but also clothing and toys.

``We will feed approximately 1,000 people,'' said Pete Calzia, a Hart geometry teacher and football coach who helps organize the annual event.

The dinner, to be served between 6 and 9 p.m. Saturday, will be potluck on a mass scale. Calzia has enlisted 600 volunteers and assigned them various jobs in the mammoth effort. Many of the youths are on cooking detail, which means they prepare a dish and make sure it's enough food to feed 10 people.

Students and parents will bring the food to the cafeteria from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday, where it will be stored until dinner time, Calzia said.

Local businesses have loaned or donated items to Hart High to help stage the annual benefit. A.V. Equipment Rentals let the school borrow 25 tables to set up in the cafeteria, which has an occupancy limit of 800.

Frosty's, a local Christmas tree lot, donated four trees to dress up the cafeteria; the Sav-on drugstore in Canyon Country gave candy and holiday decorations; and a local Ralphs supermarket donated turkeys and milk for the meal, Calzia said.

Students armed with fliers advertising the dinner were assigned a ``foot beat'' to walk, thereby spreading the word to the local residents and inviting them to attend. Hart High also enlisted churches and the local community center to publicize the feast, Calzia said.

The event has become such a Hart High tradition that even after students graduate they still come back each year, many of them when they return home from college on their Christmas break, to pitch in and help, Calzia said.

In fact, he estimated that one-sixth of his volunteer corps are either Hart High alumni or the parents and siblings of current students.

``A lot of students jump on the bandwagon for this, and a lot of families find this a good avenue to teach their children about helping those less fortunate,'' Calzia said.

There was no specific event that inspired the first holiday feast, in 1991, other than Calzia's opinion that teen-agers - who by nature are at a self-centered stage in their lives - should look outward and do something for someone else.

In the ensuing years, the lessons students have learned include: ``what it means to give to somebody less fortunate, what it is to give rather than receive, what it is to be a servant rather than a master of somebody,'' the teacher said.