Schools Cross the Line With Values Training : Ventura: District plans to expand pilot program. Challenges include moving beyond talking about ethics to changing behavior.

With her seventh-grade classes at Balboa Middle School, teacher Gail Shirley has been taking some unusual departures from her typical rounds of geography and history lessons.

Twice a week, Shirley uses a catchy saying from a glossy, pocket-sized book her mother-in-law gave her to instill in her 12- and 13-year-old students a positive character trait.

“Laziness travels so slow that poverty soon overtakes him,” for example, was the basis of a lesson about the virtues of hard work.

Such a lesson seems innocuous. But in her attempt to build the characters of her young students, Shirley is stepping over a line that many educators before her have feared to cross.

She is teaching moral values in the public schools.

Launched as a pilot program this fall at a number of schools in the Ventura Unified School District, the character-development program, a brainchild of Supt. Joseph Spirito, has been in the works for two months.

Students at Balboa and about half a dozen other schools have been writing essays, drawing pictures, performing skits and holding class discussions about what traits such as honesty, respect and responsibility mean to them. Principals at some of these schools say they have already noticed a difference in their students: fewer fights, less tension, more mutual respect.

“We have had much less hostility on the campus,” Balboa Principal Henry Robertson said. “We feel we’re seeing a more pleasant atmosphere than we’ve had in several years.”

Now a committee of parents, teachers and community residents is developing a curriculum to take the program districtwide in February, so that all of the district’s 15,000 students from kindergarten through 12th grade will learn virtues such as kindness and courage along with their usual diet of reading and arithmetic.

But some committee members and educational experts warn about the difficulty of establishing a morality curriculum that meets two key criteria: It works and it doesn’t smack of religion.

Rabbi Michael Berk of Temple Beth Torah in Ventura said he joined the curriculum committee to help ensure that no one injected his or her own religious views into the new program.

“This is a very difficult thing to teach in the schools,” Berk said. “You have to keep religion out of it. In the synagogue or in the church we can say ‘The reason you have to respect the dignity of other people is because God says so.’ I don’t want the schools teaching it that way. But there is something to be said about establishing an environment that demands respect for the dignity of human beings.”

So far, the district’s curriculum committee has set the goal of helping each student develop six characteristics of a “morally mature person”:

* respect for human dignity;

* care for others’ welfare;

* balancing individual interests and social responsibility;

* integrity;

* awareness of personal and moral choices;

* searching for a peaceful resolution to conflict.

“The dilemma for us is choosing universal ethical values,” said Pat Chandler, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction.

School officials have another concern besides keeping religion out of their morality curriculum.

To really influence students, schools have to go beyond just talking and writing about good moral values, experts say. “All of the emphasis in the 1960s and 1970s on character education was on discussions of moral dilemmas or moral problems,” said Myron Denbo, educational psychology professor at the University of Southern California. “This has been the criticism. People in the field are now saying: In order to teach these values, you must go beyond discussion.”

Even if children demonstrate to teachers that they understand and value honesty, Denbo said, that doesn’t mean the students will practice truthfulness.

“Children don’t live in a vacuum,” Denbo said. “How students treat each other, how teachers treat their students, that’s all a part of how they learn about values.”

Ventura school officials are aware that they have to take the character development program beyond classroom discussions.

“Just talking about it doesn’t change anything,” Chandler said. “You have to make it an integral part of things.”

Teachers will have to bring families into the act, as schools in the pilot program are already trying to do, Chandler said, by asking parents to be more conscious of themselves as role models for their children.

“How many times have you heard a person say, when they didn’t want to take a phone call, that they aren’t there when in fact they are?” she said. “Is that honest?”

Principals and teachers will also have to be more conscious of how their school’s rules and their own behavior influences children, Chandler said.

Some schools may need to operate more democratically, she added, giving students a voice in determining the school’s rules, discipline and even what they should learn.

Teachers and principals at schools operating the pilot program said they have already begun changing some of their practices.

At Montalvo School, teacher Jane Merino said she makes a point of congratulating students in her second-grade bilingual class whenever they demonstrate particular character traits that the class has studied, such as responsibility or honesty.

And Montalvo Principal Marie Atmore has changed her policy for times when children turn in money they find on the playground.

Previously, Atmore would keep the money for a week and if no one claimed it, she would call the student who found it to her office and give him or her the money.

But last week she made a special trip to Merino’s classroom to ceremoniously reward the student who a week before had turned in money he found.

The presentation went along nicely with Merino’s instruction on the value of honesty, Merino said.

Although “it was just a dime,” she said, “it helped everyone to focus on the positive consequences of being honest.”