Having a pen pal is a fun and old-fashioned way of writing someone anywhere in the world.

At Loomis Grammar School, students are using the PC Pals program to communicate with employees at Intel in Folsom. But there are no pens involved here; it’s all done via e-mail.

Teacher Kari Hazen said the program allows one-on-one interaction between a student and a mentor.

“PC Pals is a way that our students can communicate with a professional within the technology industry,” Hazen said.

Student Andrew Clevenger, 14, uses his twice-weekly e-mails to his PC Pal to ask questions about software and computers.

“They help out with math as well,” Andrew said.

Andrew said he can write from home, but “all e-mails are looked at by Mrs. Hazen before they are sent out.”

Hazen confirmed she reviews all e-mails from Intel employees to students and from students to their mentors using Gaggle.net, a free e-mail filter for schools.

According to Hazen, students in grades six through eight were selected by their teachers to participate in the program, and seventh-graders wrote essays telling why they wanted to join.

PC Pals are all naturally curious students, she said. “Some didn’t have a lot of technology experience … some want to be engineers.”

Hazen said the Intel PC Pals run the gamut from lawyers to engineers to technical writers to marketing directors.

“The employees are highly educated, promoting education, pushing students to do their best,” she said.

For Intel attorney Todd Wilson, PC Pals is a communication and educational tool.

“It’s a nice way to converse with students on a regular basis,” said Wilson. They use it to chat “about what they’re doing in school, what they’re doing generally.”

Wilson said he always uses proper sentence and paragraph structure in e-mails. He hopes this will help students develop good communication and proper writing skills.

“We’re very careful in our e-mails not to use text-type messages. We don’t truncate words, or use the kind of lingo used in text messages,” he said.

Wilson, of Penryn, said this is his second year as a PC Pal mentor, and that this year he is e-mailing students at two different schools. He has also been an Intel volunteer at Penryn Elementary School, where his son Kristian is in the third grade.

Mark Pettinger, external affairs manager for Intel, said PC Pals is administered through the Intel Foundation’s Intel Involved matching grant program.

The program, Pettiinger said, donates, or matches, $10 for every hour an Intel employee volunteers. An employee must volunteer at least 20 hours in order for the non-profit or educational organization to receive the funding.

“The cap is $25,000 per school … there are schools that do receive that,” he said.

According to Pettinger, for the 2007-08 school year Penryn Elementary School received $1,260 from the Intel Involved volunteer match grant program.

From 2005 through 2008, the program generated a total of $75,920 in donations to Placer County schools, he said.

Hazen said Loomis Grammar is the first school in the district to utilize the PC Pals program, which will continue throughout the school year. She feels it is giving her students “real-life experience.”

“It gives them to exposure to what real life is all about, something they can take with them. They’ll be able to take knowledge learned from a buddy, a PC Pal … learn how to communicate properly with e-mail and continue to learn,” she said.