In December 2008, I was invited to tag along with a delegation from the Delta that went to New York to get a firsthand view of the Harlem’s Children’s Zone.
The purpose of the trip, sponsored by Delta Council, was to see what was working so well to save children from negative outcomes and change a culture in one of the most hard-up areas of America.
The Harlem Children’s Zone had so impressed Barack Obama, who was president-elect at the time, that he said he wanted to replicate the model in 20 other impoverished places around the country. The hope of that Delta delegation was that this region would be selected for at least one of these “Promise Community” designations and the federal funding that went with it.
Although 20 was an ambitious number, the Delta did initially get selected for one pilot project, to be run under the auspices of the Delta Health Alliance, which Delta Council also helped to launch.
I had hoped at the time that Delta Health Alliance would select Greenwood to be the first location, but it opted instead for Indianola. I largely lost track of the initiative after that.
Last week’s announcement, though, that Leflore County has been selected to be the third Promise Community in Mississippi and the 12th in the nation has reignited my interest. The designation comes with a $30 million grant to cover the first five years of operation, with the possibility of funding being extended after that should the effort be successful.
What is that effort?
To surround poor children with attentive, loving adults from birth through college. It involves training parents, even before the birth of their babies, how to effectively raise and nurture their offspring. It involves working with the public schools to supplement what’s taking place within their classrooms, especially putting a heavy emphasis on raising students’ literacy skills. It involves connecting directly with the children through after-school and summer enrichment programs. It involves blanketing children with all the support — physical, emotional and intellectual — they might need to thrive, and to keep providing that blanket of support every year until they become adults themselves.
Karen Matthews, the Delta Health Alliance CEO whom I met on that trip in 2008, says that both the Indianola Promise Community and a second one for children in the Leland and Hollandale areas have produced immediate and long-term results. The example she provided to the Greenwood City Council was of a school where just 30% of first graders had been reading at grade level, but by the following year they all were.
Indianola, since it’s been a Promise Community the longest in the Delta, would seem to be the best place to gauge the results of the initiative.
To do that I looked at this past spring’s state test scores and compared Indianola’s results to those in the Greenwood Leflore Consolidated School District.
There were some striking differences, particularly in the earlier school years.
In both third and fourth grades, the students in Indianola scored proficient or above at a rate substantially higher than did their counterparts in Leflore County. Though the scores in Indianola were still well below the state average, its third graders reached the two highest performance levels in English at a rate twice that of Leflore County; in fourth grade math the difference was twentyfold.
Interestingly, though, the test-score gap mostly closed after fourth grade. In fact, in some tested areas in the higher grades, the Leflore County students outperformed those in Indianola.
Test scores admittedly are not an all-conclusive comparison. It does, however, make one wonder whether the gains that the Promise Community program produces in a child’s younger years evaporate over time.
One distinct difference between what I remember about the Harlem Children’s Zone and how Delta Health Alliance has adapted those principles is that the Harlem model took a much more radical, sometimes go-it-alone approach. If it didn’t get buy-in from the existing schools, for example, it created its own by launching two charter schools so it could extend the school day and the school year.
For the Harlem Children’s Zone model to work optimally, almost every adult who touches the life of a child born into poverty has to be singing from the same sheet and to stay on that sheet for some 20 years. That means not only the do-gooders who come to a community but also the existing support structure and the families targeted for this additional help. That kind of long-term cooperation and commitment is difficult to accomplish.
It will be exciting to see if it can happen here.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
