Story 15 - Potentiality Development Project: A Promise Beyond High School

Founded in 1965, the Potentiality Development Project (PDP) began as a pilot program to help capable students at Lincoln High School graduate and obtain a college degree.

PDP directed itself toward encouraging positive development in the counselees by using the one-to-one approach. The project works with the concept that the beliefs a person has about oneself are greatly influenced by the type of feedback he/she receives from others. From this concept comes the hypothesis that successful college students can have a positive influence on the lives of high school students who have sufficient academic promise to be successful in college, but who come from families in which neither parent has graduated from college.

Four years later, in 1969, 84% of these students enrolled in college. Those results were quite encouraging in the view of Wiliam Boagar, principal of Lincoln High School, who estimated that only approximately 18% of this group would have attended college under ordinary circumstances. That same year, in an NHRI press release, the Nebraska School Board Association shared they would like PDP to become a prototype for a state-wide program.

Later in the 1970-71 Annual Report, PDP planned to expand to Lincoln Northeast High School during the 1972-73 school year, but records show it never was realized as there were financial constraints. PDP concluded in 1977 as a new project, Lincoln Development Project (LDP) began at Lincoln High School.

In researching for NHRI’s 75th Anniversary, a PDP scrapbook was discovered. This was from the first year of the project: 1965-1966. To our knowledge, no other NHRI project in our program’s history has a scrapbook devoted exclusively to their first year of existence.