Agencies cooperate to sponsor program

Staff report

campbell

A foundation dedicated to children’s issues will fund a new effort to help children who fall behind in school because of social issues such as poverty.

Campbell Works for Children is a collaboration of agencies and will be a model for other programs.

It is being funded with $302,000 from the William Swanston Charitable Fund, an organization that is included in the Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley, an umbrella organization for foundations. The CFMV will provide administrative services. The Raymond John Wean Foundation will assist the new collaboration with analyzing grant requests.

Representatives of the three foundations, along with school officials and leaders of agencies in the collaboration, met to announce the program Thursday at the Campbell Elementary and Middle School building.

Included in the Campbell Works collaboration are Neighborhood Ministries, which has offices in the city and is awarded $90,000 to develop summer and after-school programs; D&E Counseling Center, which will use $32,000 for 40 to 50 children between age 6 and 12 in a program to help with emotional and behavioral problems; the Help Hotline and Catholic Charities Regional Agency, which are awarded $55,000 to work together to develop an anti-bullying project; the Eastern Ohio P-16 Partnership, which will use $5,000 to link the project with other educational opportunities in the region; and Community Solutions Association, which is awarded $30,000 and will bring its established Project Kind to Campbell for the next school year. The program teaches social and behavioral skills to kindergarten students.

Campbell Works is the result of six months of planning, said schools Superintendent Thomas Robey.

“When you have children of poverty, there’s a whole series of other problems we have to take on,” he said.

“Ninety percent of the children who attend Campbell Elementary School live in poverty,” said Robert Walls, principal of the elementary school.

Campbell schools will be a “laboratory of sorts,” said Paul Dutton, Swanston board chairman.

He said the board requested grant proposals last fall from organizations wanting to serve children in the Mahoning Valley. After reviewing the proposals, Campbell emerged as a good place to develop a collaboration because it is a city in need but has a school system with innovative leaders, eager students and supportive teachers, he said. The foundation contacted the agencies who’d submitted grant requests and asked them to revise the requests to develop “collaborative strategies,” for Campbell, he said.

The end goal, said Robey, is to come up with a model program.

Swanston, which funds programs dedicated to the care of abused, neglected and dependent children, awarded three other grants Thursday.

The Mahoning County High School, for children expelled from their own districts, was awarded $20,000. The Family Service Agency’s Daybreak emergency shelter was awarded $20,000, and Valley Counseling Services was awarded $50,000 for work in preventing expulsions from the Warren City School District.