A raspberry -- the "Personal Contact" award -- to the Temecula Valley Unified School District, which has apparently taken a page from the Radio Shack playbook and taken to laying off teachers via e-mail. Rhonda Parish, the woman who began Great Oak High School's choir program two years ago, was notified by e-mail Aug. 19 that her services were no longer required at the school.

That would have been bad enough, but it turns out the school used an outdated e-mail address, so Parish showed up to teach her class last week as if nothing had changed. Her students learned they would be losing the vocal coach who had built the award-winning program from the ground up when the new teacher's name was painted on the classroom door one day.

District officials say they had no choice but to replace Parish: She was not credentialed, so when a qualified, credentialed teacher came along, they had to hire him. That may be true, but it's hard to imagine an employment situation butchered any worse. Students and parents are petitioning to demand the district retain Parish, which it may not be able to do, and caught in the middle is the new teacher, John O'Donnell, who is an innocent bystander but already taking heat better directed at the district. At the very least, he figures to start out with a much smaller choir, since three dozen of Parish's students have asked to be transferred.

And all because someone at the district felt it was acceptable to lay someone off by e-mail.

A rose -- the "Young Philanthropist" award -- to Jason O'Neill, the 10-year-old budding businessman and inventor of Pencil Bugs. Jason's simple, colorful creations began as a product for craft fairs last year, but have caught on so well around Temecula that he has gone into business -- even getting a city license, state tax ID number and starting up a Web site. A local school supply chain has starting stocking the styrofoam-and-pipe-cleaner adornments.

Probably most impressive, though, is Jason's charitable streak. He gives 5 percent of his sales to Hugs Foster Family Agency in Temecula, a place he heard about through his mom, with plans to raise even more. His donations have allowed Hugs to buy gifts for kids who end up there. For some of those kids, those are the first gifts they've ever gotten. "Jason is just such a great kid," says Margeaux Brochtrup, a supervisor at the center.

Indeed.

A rose -- the "Tear Down This Gate" award -- to property owners in Wildomar, who voted this month to tax themselves in order to reopen three parks that had been shuttered for six years and to maintain a fourth that will be built by a developer. The vote was closer than it should have been, but at least a solid majority saw that spending $45 a year to reclaim three parks was a worthwhile deal.

No one likes to pay more taxes -- and it seems like that's all we get asked to do any more -- but residents in nearby cities all pay for their parks, too, so Wildomarians aren't being asked to do anything special. Roses, too, to Bridgette Moore, John Lloyd and a host of others who devoted a good part of their lives the past six years to making this happen. Play ball!

A raspberry -- the "Sausage Maker" award -- to the California Legislature, which, for the 100th year in a row or so, decided that the bulk of its work could be done in the final week -- even the final day -- of an eight-month legislative session. Railing against our elected officials for this annual tactic is very much like railing at the proverbial brick wall for existing, but we feel better after a good venting.

Every so often, it is suggested by one politician or another that California should return to the part-time Legislature it used to have. The standard reply is the state is much too large to be governed by anything less than a full-time lawmaking body (if you can accept that eight months of four-day weeks is full time …).

But if that's true, why does 90 percent of the lawmaking get pushed back to the last few days of the session, when so many bills are being hashed out that it's guaranteed legislators have no idea what they're voting on? At least with a part-time legislature, we might get less mischief and meddling. At the very least, it would cost us less.