The animated video that led Christian leaders to question the sexuality of SpongeBob SquarePants makes its debut this morning at an Upper West Side elementary school.

Two classes of first-graders at P.S. 87 are to see the “We Are Family: A Musical Message for All” video, which features SpongeBob, as well as other favorite children’s television characters, including Arthur, Barney, Big Bird, and Dora the Explorer, singing “We are Family.” The showings are part of the nationwide kickoff of a new diversity curriculum.

“We have heard from many educators around the country that teaching these issues to little kids is difficult because there aren’t a lot of materials out there,” the president of the We Are Family Foundation, Nancy Hunt, said. The foundation created the curriculum and the video.

Ms. Hunt said the video’s message is simple: “Different kids have different skin tones, different religions, different backgrounds. We can all be kind to each other and be friends.”

She said the video helps communicate that message by combining characters that usually appear only in separate time slots.

The children will watch the approximately four-minute video and then participate in lesson plans devised by the We Are Family Foundation. Using dances, collages, and paint-mixing, the lesson plans guide the students in discussing tough issues such as differences in races, family sizes, and languages.

This week the video is being distributed to more than 15,000 public-school districts, reaching more than 60,000 public schools across the country.

The video originally hit the news when the founder of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, James Dobson, said it seemed to be a tool for brainwashing children into becoming gay. The work never mentions sexuality, however, and neither does the teachers’ guide. Also, SpongeBob is far from the main character. He appears for just seconds in the sing-along video.

Yesterday, the public policy media representative for Focus on the Family, Christopher Norfleet, said his group would not comment on the debut.

The chairwoman of the City Council’s Committee on Education, Eva Moskowitz, said that as a parent, she teaches her children about diversity and tolerance every day.

“It’s not automatic,” she said. “Kids have to be taught about what is respectful behavior.”

She said it’s a good thing that New York schools haven’t been deterred from the program by the flap over SpongeBob.

“We come to the attention of a lot of folks because of our positions on choice, gun control, a whole bunch of issues,” she said. “We lead the nation on many fronts. Is the Christian right going to have a problem with anything from the teaching of diversity to the teaching of sex ed? Yes. Do we in New York have the obligation to do that? Absolutely.”

The writer of the song “We are Family,” Nile Rodgers, who created the eponymous foundation, planned to be at the launch, as did Ms. Hunt and representatives of the Anti-Defamation League.