Neighborhoods seek ‘Promise’

Associated Press

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.

Tesheda Mansfield grew up in the protective walls of Sunland Park Elementary, participating in beauty pageants and field day, and walking home from school in the afternoons.

Now when she looks around the South Florida community she and her four daughters call home, she sees teenage boys hanging out at all hours in a nearby park, homes in battered condition, some with wood covering the windows, and groups of men and children sitting listlessly on their front porches.

“There’s a lot of parents over here that don’t have a job,” Mansfield, a hospital receptionist said. “Some of them don’t even know how to put together a r sum .”

Sunland Park Elementary was given an ‘F’ on Florida’s annual school grades for three years in a row — only rising to a ‘D’ in the last school year. Ninety-nine percent of its students qualify for free or reduced price lunch — a key indicator of poverty. And though there have been some signs of academic improvement — the percent reaching high math standards rose from 30 percent to 48 percent last year — the statistics still paint a less than rosy picture.

When Mansfield and others are asked what’s to blame for the school’s struggles, they all point to one factor.

“The school is really not doing better because of the community,” Walter Hinton, president of the local homeowners association, said on a recent, humid summer afternoon.

The Obama administration thinks that theory is right: If children don’t have a safe place to live and study, or if they come to school with an empty stomach, the belief is, they can’t learn.

Taking a page from the successful Harlem Children’s Zone project, the administration requested $210 million from the 2011 budget to help blighted neighborhoods provide family, community and school supports, with the hope it will boost student achievement. More than 300 communities, including Sunland Park, have applied to become a “Promise Neighborhood.” The first 20 planning grants are expected to be announced Tuesday.

Can the premise lift the students in Sunland Park? Is a strong community enough?

The Harlem Children’s Zone started its idea with a single block in New York City in the early 1990s, providing adults with financial advice and domestic-crisis counseling, teaching expectant parents about prenatal nutrition and child rearing and offering a safe place and focused learning for preschool children.

The initiative grew to 100 blocks and now serves thousands of families with an $84 million budget.

At the two charter schools the organization runs, results have been impressive: 100 percent of children in its Harlem Gems pre-kindergarten program have been school-ready for seven consecutive years. One hundred percent of third graders scored at or above grade level on the New York state math exam in 2009.

Eighty-six percent of those who participated in its program for parents increased the amount of time spent reading to their children, and about 650 HCZ students are now in college.

There’s also evidence they are chipping away at the achievement gap: A study by two Harvard University economists found that the typical eighth-grade student in the Harlem Children Zone’s middle school outscores the typical white eighth-grade student in New York City public schools.

“What you’re trying to do is take a community that has not been a healthy community for children and create a healthy environment for kids to grow up in,” said Geoffrey Canada, the compassionate, relentless leader of the Harlem Children’s Zone. “So your very environment and your community doesn’t become an obstacle.”

Is it the family and community supports that have made the children successful? Their parents? The school?

That’s the question countless studies have tried to nail down in determining how best to help students in distressed communities with perpetually failing schools. The Education Department is trying a multiprong approach: Billion-dollar programs to turn around failing schools, reform education and, now, whole communities.