A Clash of Attitudes Over Project Self-Esteem in Schools

The fourth-grade students at Anaheim Hills Elementary School turned their attention to the three women in red aprons standing at the front of the classroom.

The third 40-minute Monday afternoon session of Project Self-Esteem--an elementary school program that one parent’s group alleges is a form of group therapy violating religious and privacy rights--was about to begin.

“Good afternoon class,” parent volunteer Deb Johnson said with a smile. “Today we’re going to talk about giving and receiving compliments.”

But before getting into the day’s lesson, Johnson said, the students would first be reviewing last week’s lesson on the idea that they are in charge of their attitudes and that “attitude is the difference.”

Johnson asked if the students had worked on changing any of their attitudes since the last session.

More than a dozen hands shot up.

“I usually get mad when my mom punishes me, but this time I didn’t,” one boy offered.

“My sister reads my diary and stuff,” a girl said, adding that rather than getting angry at her sister the last time it happened, “I just came in and told her: ‘Don’t do that any more. I have some private things.’ ”

“OK,” Johnson said, “so attitudes make the difference, and that makes you special when you can change your attitude. . . .”

Instilling a sense that each person is special, or unique, is the starting point of Project Self-Esteem, an elementary school program designed by two Newport Beach women eight years ago to “enhance the individual child’s self-esteem” and, in so doing, “awaken the full scope of that child’s learning potential.”

The program, which for the past two years has been available to Orange County schools at no charge through the county Department of Education, addresses such topics as feelings, goal-setting, communication skills, friendship, peers and conformity, and the difference between tattling and cheating.

So far, an estimated 200 schools countywide have requested the Project Self-Esteem curriculum.

But supporters of the program in recent months have found Project Self-Esteem at the center of a controversy that has reached the courtroom.

Last June, a group of parents calling themselves the Capistrano Parents Committee for Academic Freedom filed a lawsuit against the Capistrano Unified School District, alleging that the district unlawfully implemented the program without school board approval.

The committee also charges that the school district is administering psychological treatment through Project Self-Esteem without the informed consent of parents, and that volunteers are being used to unlawfully provide instruction in the classroom.

“There are really a lot of issues in the case, and every one of them is really a major legal issue,” said David Hosmer, attorney for the parents committee.

Orange County Superior Court Judge Robert Green recently denied the school district’s motion to rule in its favor without a trial. Green has not yet ruled on the parent committee’s motion for a preliminary injunction that would ban Project Self-Esteem in the district’s schools until the lawsuit is settled.

The suit is scheduled to go to trial Jan. 21.

Pending litigation, however, apparently hasn’t dampened enthusiasm for the program at Anaheim Hills Elementary School and at other Orange County schools offering Project Self-Esteem this fall.

In fact, more schools than ever have signed up for the program, according to Bert Simpson, director of the Peer Assistance League program for the county’s Education Department. Project Self-Esteem is the elementary school component of PAL, which is a comprehensive program for substance-abuse prevention.

500 at Training Session

“The number (of schools) keeps going up by far,” said Simpson. “It (the lawsuit) raised some concerns, but I can’t say any schools have dropped out or any people have lessened their support of the program. In fact, it’s probably gone the other way.”

As evidence of that, about 500 parent volunteers and educators turned out for the recent annual Project Self-Esteem training session in Garden Grove.

Among the parents was Gaye Kelley. She said she was so impressed with the changes in her 8-year-old daughter, Jennifer, who participated in the program last year, that she decided to be a Project Self-Esteem volunteer this fall at Zeyen Elementary School in Garden Grove.

Kelley explained that her daughter had had self-esteem problems resulting from a clubfoot.

‘Amazing Distances’

“When the program came in I saw a lot of changes in her,” Kelley said. “Jennifer has just come amazing distances.”

“It’s an excellent program, and it’s a shame to have all this controversy,” said Lucy Farmer, another Project Self-Esteem volunteer at Zeyen Elementary School and the mother of two. “I’ve seen too many kids who don’t have self-esteem. It’s sad.”

The point of Project Self-Esteem, as Farmer sees it, “is to make them (children) think they’re special because they’re just them . The idea is if they feel better about themselves they’ll do better in school, and they’ll be able to say no to drugs and other peer pressure things that are negative. I just feel there is such a need to reach these kids before they get older.”

The idea for Project Self-Esteem was born in 1977 when Sandy McDaniel and Peggy Bielen, both former teachers who had semi-retired to raise their children, met and began discussing the possibility of starting a school program that would address the attitudes of children.

From their own classroom experience, they said, they knew that “the child who likes himself learns better.”

“Our common concern was that the schools overall weren’t attacking learning problems as an attitude problem first,” said McDaniel.

“You can’t teach a child who thinks he’s dumb. If his feeling about himself is it’s hopeless to learn, you can’t teach him. If you want him to learn, you need to go in and work with him on that (negative) feeling.

“So the big question is how can you do a program that goes into the whole school and addresses the individual child’s feelings about himself, or his self-esteem. And that’s what we’ve successfully done.”

Unable to find a program they liked, McDaniel and Bielen began reading books on children’s behavior and how children learn. They also surveyed parents, teachers and children themselves, asking questions such as: What is it in a child’s life that hurts his or her self-esteem? What do you see your child having difficulty with? What keeps teachers from doing their job in the classroom?

‘Bottom Line of Everything’

“What we came up with,” McDaniel said, “is the bottom line of everything is self-esteem: how they learn, how they relate to others, whether they’re leaders. . . .”

In 1978, after spending a year researching and creating the initial lessons for the program, McDaniel, Bielen and five other women volunteers began teaching Project Self-Esteem at Mariners Elementary School in Newport Beach. The school, McDaniel said jokingly, “was scientifically chosen because that’s where our children were.”

Over the next six years, the number of schools offering the volunteer-run program grew to 10. “We contained it to 10 schools because we wanted to focus on creating the program, not implementing it,” McDaniel said.

In 1983, McDaniel and Bielen offered Project Self-Esteem to the Orange County Department of Education to be made available at no charge to the county’s elementary schools through the Peer Assistance League.

“Our focus is substance abuse prevention education,” PAL director Simpson said. “With that focus you have to ask what is it that prevents substance abuse? One of the major underlying causes of substance abuse is low self-esteem and the inability to deal with peer pressure. What can we do to help kids build strong self-esteem and deal with peer pressure? Project Self-Esteem.”

The benefits of Project Self-Esteem, McDaniel and Bielen said, extend throughout the classroom.

“Because the child who likes himself learns better, there are fewer discipline problems so the teacher has more time to teach. The child doesn’t need to act out as much,” said Bielen, a former college, elementary and secondary school teacher who has a master’s degree in education.

Outside of a few paid lectures on self-esteem, McDaniel and Bielen said they have not made any money from the program to date.

To Receive Royalties

“This has been an entirely volunteer effort,” McDaniel said, adding, however, that they will receive royalties from a “Project Self-Esteem” teaching-guide lesson book to be published this month by B. L. Winch and Associates/Jalmar Press in Rolling Hills Estates.

Through the years, Bielen said, their motivation has been simply “to help kids.”

“We didn’t dream this thing was going to get big like this,” McDaniel said, “and we certainly didn’t dream the fundamentalists would go after us.”

“To me, it’s incomprehensible this (the controversy) is happening in that both sides are really coming from the same place: We both care about children.”

Saying that any parents who choose not to have their child participate in Project Self-Esteem are free to do so, McDaniel said that “by trying to stop the program they (members of the Capistrano parents committee) are infringing on my right to have my child in the program.”

Darryl Regan of Mission Viejo, chairman of the Capistrano Parents Committee for Academic Freedom, said he and his wife first learned about Project Self-Esteem early this year when their 9-year-old daughter came home from school one afternoon and “told us some moms came into the class. She said: ‘It sounded like they wanted me to get hypnotized, so I didn’t do it.’ ”

(Regan’s daughter was referring to a relaxation exercise in which the students were instructed to close their eyes and visualize such things as sunshine running through their bodies.)

Noting that he has been hypnotized in the past, Regan said: “The verbiage and technique was almost verbatim on what an expert had used on me.”

(In response to the complaints, McDaniel and Bielen have replaced the exercise with one involving the tightening and loosening of muscles.)

Regan said he went to his daughter’s school the next day with a note formally requesting his daughter’s removal from the Project Self-Esteem class.

Regan then began phoning school board members who, he said, told him that they knew nothing about Project Self-Esteem being taught in the district’s schools. “The school board had no idea what was going on,” he said, adding that he wanted to know “how a curriculum like this gets in nine schools in the district without board approval.”

Public Discussions Sought

Over the next few months, Regan said, he and other concerned parents made phone calls, wrote letters and presented petitions to the school board asking that the board hold public discussions on Project Self-Esteem and that the board members either approve or disapprove the program for use in the district’s schools.

But, Regan said, “they just ignored our voices, and that’s when we realized they (board members) have no accountability. We had no other choice but to file the suit.

“In our estimation, Project Self-Esteem is a values-clarification curriculum. It’s what the educators call ‘affective education,’ as opposed to academics or the basics.

“We have presented the program material to local licensed psychologists who said, in effect, that ‘these techniques--role-playing, guided imagery--are what I use in my practice.’ This is definite psychological testing, and some of it borders on invasion of privacy within the family structure.

“The program has been in Orange County almost nine years, and the law requires previous parental consent for anything psychological or pertaining to family matters, personal beliefs . . . before it can be administered in public schools for children. Until June, 1985, there had never been a parental consent letter.”

McDaniel and Bielen, who maintain that the program is not psychological treatment and therefore does not apply to the portion of the education code requiring previous parental consent, said parents must now sign a permission slip before their child can participate in the program. Although parent volunteers in the past were instructed to hold informal meetings in order to explain the program to parents, parental consent forms had not been issued because, McDaniel said, “we had never been challenged about the program so there was no need for one.”

Administered by Volunteers

“Our next big gripe,” Regan said, “was the fact the program was administered by volunteer mothers with very little training.

“And also, in the instructions to the teachers there is a very clear passage that says ‘absolutely nothing about Project Self-Esteem is to be shared with the parents. If a parent questions you about PSE, change the subject and get them off the track.’ That’s a quote from the training manual for volunteer mothers. We didn’t like that at all. What are they hiding?

“When we approached them about this, they said it was privileged information. That kind of privilege exists for priests, doctors and attorneys--it’s a professional privilege--not for volunteer mothers.”

(McDaniel said the passage is from the old volunteer training manual and has since been clarified “to support our original belief that it is the responsibility of the teacher to communicate with parents about their child. Anything that needs to be communicated to the parents needs to come from the classroom teacher, not as gossip from the PSE team.”)

Regan said that he not only objected to Project Self-Esteem being taught without parental consent but that he is also against it being taught “during regular school hours when our high schools are graduating kids who can’t read and write.

“Secondly, I am a Christian and I am endeavoring to teach my kids at home a strong moral sense of what is right and wrong. I’m teaching my kids that there are absolutes in the world. PSE has a number of lessons that directly contradict these teachings.”

Citing Project Self-Esteem’s lessons on tattling and stealing, for example, Regan said: “The overall concept is if you steal someone’s lunch, I have no right to judge you or call you a thief because you may be hungry and can’t afford your own lunch, and so that makes it right in your eyes.

Take-Home Sheet

“They’re teaching kids there really is no right and wrong. Whatever the situation demands is OK for the individual.”

(Bielen says that Project Self-Esteem does not teach values but rather “teaches children to apply their values to real-life situations.” She said that a parents’ component has been added to the program, which will be available the first of the year, in which the students will be given a take-home sheet that summarizes the day’s lesson, provides questions for the parents to ask the child about each lesson and offers parent-child activities based on the lesson. The parents’ component, McDaniel added, provides “a place where the parents can tell the child their values one more time.”)

The changes McDaniel and Bielen have made in Project Self-Esteem have not mollified Regan and the parents committee.

“Some of our complaints have been alleviated,” he said. “Some of them, according to the counsel we are receiving, are superficial changes that don’t address the issues. And even if they change everything, the school board has still acted in a negligent manner.”

(Ronald Wenkart, attorney for the Capistrano Unified School District, said the school board approves “overall guidelines” and that one of the board’s goals within these guidelines is to raise the self-esteem of children.)

Regan, who enrolled his daughter in a private school this fall, said he thinks that “a professional, competent teacher” during the course of the day would teach such values as honesty, responsibility, discipline and respect for others.

“I don’t think we need volunteers to come in and take out valuable time, especially when what they’re teaching is contrary to those traditional values,” he said.

Regan, who has been criticized by Project Self-Esteem supporters for not having observed a PSE class in person, acknowledged that that he had been asked to audit a class but declined because “I didn’t want to attend a class prepared for Darryl Regan.”

No Mention of Lawsuit

He also criticized Project Self-Esteem volunteers for not mentioning the pending lawsuit at parent information meetings that he or other group members have attended this fall. At one meeting, he said, he was told by a volunteer that the lawsuit was not mentioned because they didn’t want to “inject negative feelings” into the meeting. “I think that’s irresponsible,” he said.

Regan said there is no “official list” of the Capistrano parent committee’s members, but he claims the group has more than 1,300 supporters. About 80% of the group’s supporters, he said, live in the Capistrano Unified School District and the rest live in other parts of Orange County.

Although the lawsuit against the school district was filed on behalf of the Capistrano Parents Committee for Academic Freedom, Regan said his name is on the suit and “I personally am responsible for the legal fees. Many people have contributed, but I am bearing the brunt.”

Regan, who is an audio-visual producer, added that he has in recent months taken time out to attend court hearings and legal meetings and talk to the media--all of which, he said, “has cut into my business tremendously.”

“But it is something I believe in tremendously,” he said, “and if I had it to do over again I would.

“There are,” Regan said, “a group of parents who would love to leave the total upbringing of their kids to the schools. They are not responsible parents.

“But there are parents who are trying very hard to raise responsible families and who are concerned when they find things coming into the schools that they deem irresponsible, illegal and not appropriate.”

McDaniel and Bielen said the controversy surrounding Project Self-Esteem since the lawsuit was filed against the Capistrano Unified School District last June has not hurt the program.

In fact, they said, they have received calls from around the country--most of them generated by the controversy--from people interested in implementing Project Self-Esteem. They say they also have received numerous requests to speak to school, church and civic groups, and they have been asked to conduct eight PSE training sessions across the country within the next two years.

Publicity Spurs Interest

“The publicity as a result of the controversy has brought in more interest in Project Self-Esteem than we could possibly have generated for doing something good,” McDaniel said. “That’s the irony for us.”

Meanwhile, Project Self-Esteem is well under way in Orange County schools this fall.

And what do the fourth-grade students at Anaheim Hills Elementary School have to say about Project Self-Esteem?

“I like it,” said Kristy, 9. “It teaches a lot about what you should do and how you should treat people. I think the teachers are really good. They have bravery to come into the class and teach all of us every Monday. That’s not easy.”

“They share things with us and we learn a lot of stuff in life,” said Jennifer, 10. “I learned how to change my attitude, and I learned a nice way to say thanks to people, and that’s all.”

“Well, you don’t have to do social studies,” said Stephen, 10, adding: “I learned to be nice to people.”

“Especially to me,” piped in another boy.