Student Leaders Confront Toughest Teen Hurdles : Self-Esteem: Eunice Kennedy Shriver’s foundation helps Huntington Beach district fashion young role models.

Nathan Hashbarger was not thinking about drugs or the problem of teen pregnancies when he arrived at the school district’s headquarters for a meeting early Thursday morning.

But Hashbarger, 13-year-old student body vice president at Isaac L. Sowers Middle School in Huntington Beach, and two dozen other middle school students were shortly to confront those issues and other difficult questions.

They started by meeting Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of President John F. Kennedy. They then were whisked off to a daylong workshop aimed at improving each student’s sense of self-worth as a way of grappling with tough teen problems.

Shriver, after an accidental encounter with Huntington Beach City School District Supt. Diana Peters at a January statewide superintendents’ conference in Monterey, offered to help set up a self-esteem program in Huntington Beach through the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation.

The temptations of drugs and sex for young people can be overcome only through a healthy sense of self-esteem, said Shriver, who is well known for her work on mental retardation and for the Special Olympics.

The foundation is picking up the $6,000 tab to get the Community of Caring program started. The Long Beach Unified School District is the only other school system in the area to have such a program.

After attending initial workshops, teachers and students will develop activities to carry back to the classroom.

Hashbarger and the other students who attended workshops Wednesday and Thursday are not problem children. They will become role models to others later, back at their home schools.

Shriver mingled with about 100 guests, including program co-sponsors from the Huntington Beach Chamber of Commerce, over coffee, juice and rolls before Thursday’s workshop.

In an interview, Shriver said the Kennedy Foundation started the program after finding that teen-age mothers give birth to more retarded children, proportionally, than do adult mothers.

“We were in the business of trying to prevent retardation, and there was evidence that some parents of retarded children lack parenting skills--they don’t take care of their own health, getting into drug abuse and alcohol, and so the health of the fetus becomes impaired.

“It became clear that giving young mothers and fathers a sense of values and responsibility in order to make choices was something we needed to do.

“We don’t inflict any values,” Shriver said, “but we ask the participants to examine their own values and see how they apply to difficult situations.”

Some of the students did not fully appreciate who Shriver is. So Robert E. Anastasi, a former school principal from Maryland who directs the Community of Caring program for the Kennedy Foundation, told them that Shriver is the mother-in-law of actor-muscleman Arnold Schwartzenegger and mother of TV news anchor Maria Shriver--in that order. There was instant recognition and applause.

In one of several videotapes shown during the day to challenge the students to be critical thinkers, two teen-agers were shown arguing about sex. The boy is pressuring his girlfriend to sleep with him, using arguments such as “If you really loved me . . .” and “You can’t get pregnant the first time anyway.” The girl’s mother refuses to talk about sex.

Hashbarger was in a group of two girls who, by the expressions on their faces, were obviously skittish.

“I guess,” one girl said when asked whether she would feel comfortable asking her mother or a trusted teacher about sex.

Asked whether he has heard any “smoothies” in the videotape that he would use on girls, Hashbarger replied: “If you really love me.”

Breaking up with a boy who is too insistent “isn’t very easy if you’re going with somebody,” said Shelley Caplan, a student at Ethel Dwyer Middle School.

Hashbarger said, “What this program is striving for is getting people to talk and plan, and not to deal only with the moment.”

Nervously fingering a ring she had removed, Caplan said: “Yeah, he (the boy in the videotape) should think about the future. . . . They should talk to each other and decide whether they’re ready to have a family.”

There was no happy ending. Restarting the videotape, the students saw that the girl gets pregnant and her boyfriend splits.

“Hsss!” “Boo!” said the kids.