Community wins Promise grant
Federal award to fund cradle-to-career education
The Jackson Triangle in the Bay Area city of Hayward is one of five recipients of a federal Promise Neighborhood grant to give students in the low-income area academic, lifestyle, and community support to succeed in school. California State University, East Bay is lead agency on the project, which will receive $25 million over the next five years.
Map of the Jackson Triangle Promise Neighborhood (Source: Hayward Promise Neighborhood) Click to enlarge.
Promise Neighborhoods are modeled after the Harlem Children’s Zone, a groundbreaking program that runs charter schools, offers afterschool and preschool programs, and provides free parenting classes, health care, counseling, and access to social services to thousands of children and adults to help break the cycle of poverty through education.
The Hayward Promise Neighborhood is a partnership of about a dozen schools and agencies, including the city, the Hayward Unified School District, Cal State East Bay, Chabot College, the local regional occupation program, the Child Care Coordinating Council of Alameda County, and the county public health department.
“Sometimes in education there are these wonderful points of light, but a lot of times they’re siloed,” said Carolyn Nelson, dean of the College of Education and Allied Studies at Cal State East Bay and principal investigator for the project. “The whole idea of the Promise Neighborhood project is to, if you will, de-silo these wonderful projects and community resources so that they’re all coherently focused on the big picture of contributing to student achievement.”
The Jackson Triangle neighborhood doesn’t have many points of light right now. It’s been hard hit by the recession, forcing multiple families to share single-family housing; it doesn’t have many resources for residents; and it’s generally lacking in stability. The grant application to the federal government describes the area this way:
“A severely neglected community of low-income families, 37% immigrants, and most with a high school education or less. Inadequate public transit, unsafe parks, food insecurity, limited licensed child care, and redlining drive social inequities. JT schools are chronically underperforming and many JT students drop out of high school and college. Residents are disproportionately unemployed, most lack college degrees, and 61.5% spend more than 30% of their monthly income on housing.”
Focus on education
All the resources that will be brought to bear in the neighborhood are focused on one overriding goal: creating a continuum of services from cradle to career to make
Pathway from cradle-to-career in Jackson Triangle. (Source: Hayward Promise Neighborhood). Click to enlarge.
sure that students are ready for kindergarten and everything that follows.
“One of the things that we noticed in doing our needs assessment is that a significant percentage of our kids don’t come in with the level of language that you expect when they enter kindergarten,” said Andrew Kevy, the project manager and coordinator of child welfare for the Hayward Unified School District. “It’s our intention to start early on and to build the early childhood education network and then move up the pathway to elementary, middle, and high school.”
Many of the strategies to improve the schools and student achievement were developed last year through a $500,000 planning grant that the Hayward group received from the federal government, and are laid out in a 21-page plan.
Although the Harlem Children’s Zone inspired the Obama Administration to launch the program, the Hayward plan differs in one significant way: it doesn’t include charter schools. With charter schools, not everyone gets to participate, said Cal State’s Nelson, but the Jackson Triangle is inclusive.
“We’re starting with a public school and we’re working within the public school; we’re not creating a lottery system like a charter school, and I think that’s a distinctive difference which I can really embrace,” said Nelson. “You don’t pick and choose, and I think that will make a significant contribution to show what it really takes to make students successful within a public school setting.”
Congratulations! This is wonderful news! It gives me hope for the vision of neighborliness and mutual assistance that has been such a hallmark of the American tradition. I love to see my tax dollars at work in this way.
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity
The Plan is identified to model the Harlem Children’s Zone (charter school movement) but without charter schools. An interesting reversal from the highly touted propaganda film, “Waiting for Superman”. As some of us have predicted all along, charter schools are intended to be but a bridge to something far more egregious and far reaching to morph into draconian Socialsit ideas and destroy the concept of representative governance. The Comprehensive Neighborhood Revitalization Plan is enough to send chills down the spine of freedom loving citizens. The emphasis in the Plan for a Cradle to College to Career to guide child development from the womb is stuff of the novel, “1984″. At least participation in the Harlem children’s Zone charter school model is voluntary. This Plan is intented to include everyone even before being born. It echos the Santa Clara Office of Education Master Plan almost word for word when this plan says: “supporting a comprehensive Early learning Network , focuses its collective energy on implementing evidence-based approaches to support children from prenatal through third grade”.
Note new terminology (Place Based Advocacy). It is an interesting term in that it describes formation of a new demographic defined simply as “PLACE”. A SEGMENT OF NEIGHBORHOODS NEITHER DEFINED BY SCHOOL DISTRICTS, CITY, COUNTY. A new creation of a REGIONAL TRIANGLE in which individuals, and families will be included in personally intrusive government assessing, during their entire developmental years of their lives whether they like it or want it or not. It is essentially creating new little Soviets using Communitarian terminology and methods. On page 18 of the Plan itself, it is anticipated that “some parents and youth will decline to have their information shared, at least initially, but we expext that this will not be a significant problem that undermines our evaluation efforts”. One can hope that discerning parents and students WILL decline to participate in this process of Big Brother’s intrusion into their personal and private lives.
Report this comment for abusive language, hate speech and profanity