In a world overrun with headlines about shootings, scandals and a world gone awry, Jerry Palumbo offers a local heartwarming story that offers balance and speaks volumes about the community we live in.

Palumbo is a dean at Amos Alonzo Stagg High School in Palos Hills.

Every Tuesday, he and other Stagg staffers take students with special needs in the Extended School Year program out into the community for some experience applying the life skills they’ve learned in the classroom.

On June 4, the group of nine students and five adults headed to the grocery store to pick up supplies to make s’mores in the cardboard solar ovens the kids had crafted at school.

When the graham crackers, marshmallows and chocolate bars had been purchased, they stopped at the nearby Palos Diner for lunch.

Palumbo said there is substantial preparation before each field trip. In this case, a grocery list had to be compiled, with each necessary purchase being delegated to a group of students. And lunch options had to be explored and shared with parents.

Because the students also needed to stay within a predetermined school-supplied budget, a sample restaurant menu was handed out for all of the kids to take home.

“We had the kids pick ahead of time what they wanted to eat,” Palumbo said. This way, they would be ready to articulate to the server their own orders, he said.

“We wanted them to get the meal they preferred but we also wanted them to advocate for themselves and if they wanted, say, no tomatoes, to tell the server that,” he said. “Ordering at a restaurant is a daily skill we want them to hone so eventually they can do this independently.”

It wasn’t until the group arrived at the diner that they realized they were using an incorrect version of the menu.

Dean Kapitan, owner of the Palos Diner and a Stagg graduate, said wrong or outdated menus that are still floating around online present a big problem for many restaurants.

In addition to incorrect pricing, the old menus often list entrees that are no longer available, he said.

The menu the students brought with them that day dated back to when the diner opened 15 years ago, he said.

Palumbo said, “It was our mistake. We should have gone across the street and brought back a menu. But we relied on this outdated menu from an online source.”

When the staff realized the mistake, Palumbo said, “My first thought was ‘Let’s make this a teachable moment.’

“There are times when you have a Plan A and suddenly you need a Plan B,” he said. “This kind of thing happens in life.”

Among the Plan B options were for the staff to skip lunch, for the students’ choices to be limited to a couple of menu items and for everyone to return to the school and have a dessert of boxed cookies, as opposed to ice cream or pie at the restaurant.

All of which would have been fine, Palumbo said.

But then, as the Stagg staff was sorting things out, a diner whom Palumbo now calls “an angel,” overheard the conversation and made a pact with the server: Once he or she had finished eating and left the restaurant, the server could notify the Stagg group that $200 was waiting at the register for them.

“It was a wonderful surprise,” Palumbo said. “Such an incredible, selfless act.”

It enabled the group to return to its original plan.

“Immediately I wanted to know who (the donor was) so I could go up and thank the person,” Palumbo said. But the “angel” had left.

The $200, he said, was enough to pay for everyone’s meal, with dessert.

Kapitan said every now and then someone offers to pay for a stranger’s meal.

“When someone does something like that it truly comes from the heart. It’s really beautiful,” Kapitan said. “Usually when people do that, they do it quietly, which is a real humble thing.”

Kapitan said he doesn’t know the identity of the “angel” either.

“But I know the students were filled with joy. When I walked out to talk with them, I saw smiles on everyone’s faces,” he said.

Palumbo said many of the students left with doggy bags.

“It was such a feel-good day,” Palumbo said.

When the kids returned to school, he said, “we had a nice talk about how it’s so important to pay it forward and to have faith in the goodness of people.”

The next day, he said, the students made a card thanking the people who work at the diner and Palumbo delivered it.

dvickroy@tribpub.com

Twitter @dvickroy