A Small Room Crowded With Big Dreams : Like Missionaries These Teen-agers and Twentysomethings Have Organized to Spread a Message of Self-Worth: ‘I Feel Good. I Am Good.’

It was 8:45 a.m. on a Friday when teachers at the 95th Street Elementary School gave up control of their classes. And teen-agers like Qui Phu took over.

Pacing, waving her arms, dancing up and down on the balls of her feet, Phu extracted a name from every child in a room full of fourth graders. Then the diminutive 17-year-old suddenly asked, “Is there anybody here who knows what self-esteem means?”

All 29 children seemed dumbstruck. A moment passed, then a barely audible “Noooo” rose from the ranks.

“Well, that’s what we’re here to talk about,” Phu said, opening her arms wide as though she had a gift to present.

The children just looked at her, much as other third-, fourth- and fifth-graders had stared at the young adults who invaded their classrooms.

Like missionaries, these teens have come to spread the message of self-worth. They learned it through Young People for Young People, in the back room of a South-Central art center. Now they’re taking it to kids in the neighborhood.

In many ways, the group is as unique as its founder: former child star Danielle Spencer. She managed to avoid the pitfalls of youthful celebrity--five years on television’s “What’s Happening!!’ “--and now, at age 27, is Dr. Danielle Spencer, a new veterinarian. Spencer managed this, she tells elementary school kids, by doing exactly what Young People advocates: goal setting, hard work and maintaining a positive self-image.

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With a kind of high-boil energy few adults can muster, Qui Phu paces the room, asking the kids what they want to be. The answers are sparse; most of these fourth-graders haven’t considered much beyond lunchtime.

In another classroom, Petra Martinez is having the same problem as she tries to cajole 9- and 10-year-olds into visualizing their futures.

“Imagine you’re 21. What are you doing? What kind of car do you drive?” she asks.

A few respond: a big one or a motorcycle.

“You,” Martinez says to one giggling boy, “you want to be a lawyer, right? Where’s your office? What kind of car do you drive?”

“A low-rider,” he pipes up, grinning.

While the other kids laugh, Martinez encourages him: “That’s OK. You can do that.”

She continues, trying to convince the squirming kids that these aren’t daydreams, they are goals. At 22, Martinez is Young People’s president and among its oldest members. She joined the group in high school and has met at least one of her goals.

Martinez wanted to be a child-care expert, wife and mother. Now she’s married to another long-time group member, Juan Guinto, 24.

When Young People meets every week in the back room of the William Grant Still Art Center, 20 to 50 young people of all races receive tutoring, study for S.A.T. exams and learn to share their feelings.

“We’re striving for a well-rounded approach,” says Cheryl Pelt, Spencer’s mother and Young People executive director.

Pelt and Spencer founded the group in 1986 and, while Spencer now mostly plays an inspirational role, Pelt continues.

The idea came, Pelt recalls, when her family lived in Brooklyn. While studying adult education for her master’s degree at Columbia University, Pelt was struck by the directionless teen-agers she saw everywhere. When the family moved to Los Angeles in 1976, she created a series of workshops to help teens find themselves and their futures.

Knowing that children had to be indoctrinated with the idea of self-worth at an early age, Pelt decided it should be teen-agers who delivered that message.

“Kids get adult messages all the time from parents, teachers, churches. But it’s teen-agers they try to emulate,” Pelt says. “We give them teens they can mimic, who aren’t gang members.”

Now, Pelt writes workshop scripts, then brings them to the core group of about 20 Young People who experiment with language and exercise until they agree the message is clear--and fun. On one Saturday, it was a new script she had worked out, “The Secret of Happiness and Success.”

Pelt asks the youths to list their ideas for personal success--five, 10 and 15 years down the line. As one after another recites his or her ideas, the small room is crowded with dreams.

“When I’m 28, I’ll have my degree and maybe some kids,” said Guinto. “By the time I’m 37, I will design and build our own house. At 38, I’ll be happy.”

Said Kala Patterson, 17: “At 21 I’ll be a college graduate. At 26, Dr. Patterson will own a home, a car and a dog and will be dating seriously. And then when I’m 31, I’ll be married, have one kid and my own medical practice.”

While everyone takes a lunch break and critiques the morning sessions at 95th Street school, the Young People’s seriousness intensifies. Leading the discussion, Martinez chides Phu about seeming to lose control of one class. Without the regular controls of teachers and schedules, many children have became rambunctious.

Derek Moc, 12-year-old assistant to an older group leader, raises his hand. During a workshop on negative feelings, he says, a fourth-grader grabbed him by the shirt and said, “You’d better shut up or I’ll pop you in the head.”

And Maria Martinez, Petra’s 21-year-old sister, says that two fifth-grade boys kept dropping things, then asking her to bend over and pick them up.

“If we don’t keep control in our classrooms,” Petra Martinez says sternly, “they aren’t going to get the message.”

And delivering the message is Young People’s version of the Holy Grail. With only a day to reach these children, the workshop leaders repeatedly ask: Did they hear the message?

Later, George Lockwood indicates that he’s heard it: “If you don’t believe in yourself, then you’ve got low self-esteem,” the 9-year-old says before sticking out his tongue in furious concentration and going back to the shield he’s carefully drawing in Cross Phu’s workshop.

Phu, who exhibits all the energy of her older sister, Qui, clearly remembers low self-esteem. Before she came to Young People, she says, she walked hunched over, drawn in, and was painfully shy. She was embarrassed about her odd first name--taken from Southern Cross, the name of the ship that carried her family away from Vietnam. She was born on the voyage.

“Now I feel great about my name,” she says. “I’m special.”

Tiany Colvin, 16, tells a similar story about finding her worth, but through even more difficult circumstances. Suicide looked like a good option to Colvin after she was suddenly parentless when her mother was imprisoned for murder a few years ago. Now, a law degree seems a better idea.

Like others in Young People, Colvin looks to “graduates” like Spencer as proof that seemingly impossible tasks, such as college, are within their grasp.

The task of keeping Young People together has sometimes seemed nearly impossible during the last two years. Its budget operates, not so much on a shoe-string, but on a thin piece of elastic, stretched always tighter.

Last year’s corporate donations fell drastically, Pelt says, largely because most companies were funneling money into Rebuild L.A.

The group did receive $10,000 in federal funds, but $6,000 of it went for required insurance. The rest was mostly spent on a summer workshop on parenting skills, with Young People members appearing as guest speakers.

While the William Grant Still Art Center donates the space for the weekly meetings, the self-esteem rallies for elementary schools usually cost about $3,500 and are funded by corporate sponsors. Most of that money is spent on art supplies, two meals for the children and a small honorarium for Pelt and the teens who give workshops.

Digital Equipment Corp., Young People’s most consistent corporate sponsor, has adopted the 95th Street school, and sponsored the most recent self-esteem rally.

But Pelt is hunting sponsors for two other rallies the group hopes to give this year.

In the language adopted by Young People, money is a roadblock to success.

“What do we do with these roadblocks?” Cross Phu asks her fourth-grade class, as she erases the blackboard, with its child’s-eye view of negative behaviors: Ride the bike in the house. Break a window. Kill somebody. Take drugs.

“Knock ‘em down,” one boy yells.

“If we know what they (the roadblocks) are, then we can avoid them, right?” Phu asks with a big smile.

Phu gathers the children in the center of the room and asks them to put their arms around each other. Among some kids, this degenerates into head-locks and wild squirming, but they all join Phu as she leads them in a simple litany.

“I feel good,” she says, and the children shout the same.

“I look good.”

“I am good.”