“What we believe at Horizons is that all kids are our kids,” says Lorna Smith, executive director of Horizons National. “The gaps of opportunity, technology, education and so on are creating a disparity in the country that’s not healthy for any of us.”
Smith spoke to NationSwell from inside a classroom at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn. During the summer months, the school lends space to Horizons, a free summer school program for low-income children (preschool/kindergarten through high school) that combines academics with extracurricular activities. Its first chapter opened in 1964 at Connecticut’s New Canaan Country School, and thanks to private schools and universities donating classrooms, the organization now operates 45 programs across 15 states and is rapidly expanding.
Horizons focuses on one major challenge in American education: the summer slide. Although studies find that low-income children learn at about the same rates as their more affluent peers during the school year, they often fall behind as they progress through school. The issue: During the summers, children in poverty are not exposed to as many enrichment opportunities, such as museum and library trips and computer time. That’s because these activities have costs associated with them; plus, low-income parents often have less flexibility with their working hours than their wealthier counterparts.
As a result, academic skills regress, and the effects are cumulative. By fifth grade, low-income kids may be two to three years behind their classmates. And their graduation rate is much lower as well (60 percent versus more than 90 percent for affluent children), exacerbating the cycle of poverty and depriving these children from living up to their full potentials. Horizons keeps these students on track, boasting a 99 percent graduation rate for its participants; 91 percent go onto higher education.
“I think that the biggest thing the program offers kids are enrichment opportunities that they wouldn’t experience living in the neighborhoods that they lived in,” says Kevin Thompson, a former Horizons student who joined the program after the sixth grade. At the time, Thompson lived in a Stamford, Conn., neighborhood that was dangerous and economically disadvantaged, and his mother was in recovery for drug addiction. He believes that Horizons changed his life, citing the daily swimming lessons as a part of the program that helped him get his life together.
Thompson swam for his high school team and was a state-champion diver, which led to a diving scholarship at the University of Connecticut. After that, he continued his education, receiving a master’s degree in educational leadership. Today, Thompson works at Horizons, running a high school program. His eventual goal? To run a Horizons chapter.
“This program is my heart,” he says. “For me, it’s really about seeing these kids strive for excellence.”
Tag: low-income children
The Prescription for Healthier Citizens: Cleaning Up America’s Medical Facilities
Twenty-six centuries ago, a Greek physician urged his medical colleagues to remember that a doctor does “not treat a fever chart [or] a cancerous growth, but a sick human being” who has a life and responsibilities outside of a hospital wing. That level of care — a tenet of the Hippocratic Oath — is already difficult to realize, but Gary Cohen, a travel writer turned healthcare advocate, is pushing medical centers to think even bigger, realizing the connections between a patient’s sickness and its roots in an unhealthy community.
Cohen, one of this year’s recipients of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” fellowships, co-founded the global nonprofit Healthcare Without Harm (HWH), which is headquartered in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Reston, Va., in 1996. As the organization campaigned to eradicate toxic chemicals from medical equipment — mercury in thermometers, dioxins in incinerated plastic IV bags and tubes — Cohen argued that healthcare providers shouldn’t be making people sick. After significant victories, Cohen recently decided to broaden the focus of HWH from “do no harm” (another classical dictum) to actively bettering community health. With more than 500 partner organizations in 53 countries, including three of the largest nonprofit hospital systems in the U.S.: Catholic Health Initiatives, Kaiser Permanente and Dignity Health, Cohen’s raison d’être is to help doctors heal their profession.
“When we started, we were trying to get hospitals to take the Hippocratic Oath internally, applying the same set of values to their environmental footprint: to reduce the use of fossil fuels, detox the supply chain, get rid of sugar-sweetened junk food,” Cohen says. “But the bigger questions are, ‘How can you be an anchor for community and planetary health? How can you move from being these cathedrals of chronic disease to being centers of community wellness and sustainability? How can you leverage your incredible moral authority, your mission and economic clout to support healthier communities?'”
Cohen’s first job after college was writing guidebooks for top tourist destinations — London, Paris, New York — until a friend asked if he would write a primer on toxic chemicals. Not knowing anything about the topic, Cohen conducted interviews to learn more. “I sat around kitchen tables with mothers and fathers. They had no political power, no money, no technical expertise, but they were fighting for their family’s lives,” he recalls. “Their kids were sick. ‘Why does my daughter have this rare form of cancer? Why does my son wake up in the middle of the night choking for air? Why does the water taste so bad?’” The political organizing manual Cohen subsequently wrote, “Fighting Toxics,” launched what has turned into a lifelong fight for environmental safety. In 1986, he helped pass the first national right-to-know law, alerting consumers about possible chemical exposure.
A decade later, a report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that warned of on-site medical incinerators (which burn a portion of the 26 pounds of waste generated daily by each patient in a staffed hospital bed) turned Cohen’s attention to hospitals. Incineration removes one biohazard by burning pathogens, but the burning plastic sends other dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere. Tests found dioxin in children’s body fat and traces of mercury in infants’ blood. “The healthcare system is a major polluter,” Cohen says, realizing that, “the very institution devoted to healing people is poisoning them.”
Starting with a team of 28 organizers, Cohen’s advocacy has helped reduce the number of on-site medical waste incinerators in the U.S. from a high of 5,600 to just 70 a decade later. And those hazardous measuring devices containing mercury? HWH’s work has resulted in them, for all practical purposes, being eliminated from hospitals and pharmacies.
What’s unique about HWH’s approach is that these reforms went into effect “without basically any legislation at the federal level,” Cohen says. “We started, you might say, in the basement,” talking with the facility managers and architects. As the cause gained momentum and sustainability worked its way into hospital chains’ strategic priorities, Cohen now has access to meet with vice presidents and CEOs.
Recently, HWH worked with hospitals to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, convincing medical facilities not only to buy solar panels for hospital rooftops, but also to subsidize them for employees’ homes. The organization has also helped school systems and hospitals partner to generate demand for local, sustainably produced food. And it’s demonstrated that the construction of new hospital wings can strategically promote economic development in poorer parts of a city.
HWH has also been bolstered by President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare legislation, the Affordable Care Act, which requires hospitals to conduct community health needs assessments (essentially tabulating why people come to the emergency room). “What conditions in the community are contributing to diseases? Is there food insecurity? Is there pollution? Is there poor housing, violence and poverty? These are the things that are making people sick in the first place,” Cohen says. He adds that the same principles apply to climate change. After witnessing Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, doctors can’t avoid seeing that global warming’s added risk of flooding or extreme heat as essential to their work. “If you’re a person in Cleveland and you think climate change is all about polar bears and melting ice caps, then you’ve got other stuff to worry about. But when you understand that it has to do with [a patient’s] asthma, the spread of West Nile virus or dengue fever, that reality can no longer be ignored. Now I’m paying attention.”
Cohen’s larger hope is that changes in the healthcare profession, which accounts for $2.9 trillion in spending, resonates throughout the broader economy. Because hospitals must prioritize a patient’s wellbeing, they can invest the extra dollars needed to drive innovation and scale greener practices. Once they prove the business model is viable, other corporations might take notice.
If you ask American citizens which profession they trust most, as Gallup has since 1976, doctors and nurses consistently rank among the most honest and ethical. Eighty percent report high trust in nurses; compared to just 7 percent for members of Congress. Cohen believes medical professionals must live up to this respect by watching out for our health — even when we ourselves don’t want to. Not just whether we’re running a high temperature or have a cough, but the broad influences on the health of our cities.
“I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required,” doctors pledge in the Hippocratic Oath. “I remain a member of society,” they add, “with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.” Cohen will be holding them to their word.
Participants Claim This Program Boosts Them out of Poverty. Should Other Cities Implement It?
LaKesha Griffin wanted to get as far from Memphis as she could. A self-described “hardheaded” teen, she ignored her mother’s pestering about college and found a job post-high school as a flight attendant for United Airlines. But in 2001, United Flight 175 brought down the South Tower of the World Trade Center and United Flight 93 crashed in a Pennsylvania field. The airline industry took a massive hit, and despite six years of seniority, Griffin was one of 20,000 people laid off from United. Unemployed, she returned home to Tennessee.
“It was an awful thing,” is how Griffin describes her experience of looking for work for three or four years. “I needed to start all over. It’s not like you walk into McDonalds and make $20 an hour.” She obtained a practical nursing certificate in 2002, but still struggled to find work. When the country fell into recession after the subprime mortgage crisis, Griffin realized she needed a college degree. But as she neared the 72-month lifetime limit on drawing welfare benefits, she realized that she was in a bind: without a full-time job, she couldn’t support herself and her teenage daughter; with full-time employment, she wouldn’t have time to focus on her schooling. That’s when, seemingly by chance, a savior called her on the phone.
Five years later, Griffin has a daughter in college (who’s preparing to attend law school) and a master’s degree of her own. She’s been employed consistently since May 2012, most recently as a social worker for the Mississippi Department of Family and Children’s Services. How did a family that subsided on food stamps become so successful in such a short period?
Family Rewards is a bold attempt to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty, but it’s rooted in a simple premise: pay parents small amounts of money so they don’t have to scramble to make ends meet, but make those funds conditional on bettering the next generation’s chances of escaping poverty. (In other words, pay a hungry person to teach their kids to fish.) Known as a conditional cash transfer, the three-year program (which concluded in 2014) recruited 1,200 families relying on public assistance in the Bronx and Memphis. Many were led by single mothers, and all included at least one child of high school age. Family Rewards offered eight incentives, ranging from $40 to $500, for these families to improve their employment, education and health. A full study is forthcoming next year, but early data that the program’s organizers shared with NationSwell reveals that this new model could redefine our country’s welfare system.
In Memphis, out of the 613 families enrolled, 99 percent earned at least one of the eight rewards, according to data provided to NationSwell by the Children’s Aid Society, which is the lead agency operating Family Rewards. Nine out of every 10 families improved their health by getting an annual physical ($100 per family member) or dental care twice yearly (another $100 per visit). Ninety-six percent of the 1,097 Memphis high school students who participated received at least one cash reward for having a 95 percent attendance rate ($40 a month), taking the SAT or ACT exam (a one-time $50), getting higher grades ($30 per A, $20 per B and $10 per C) and passing their final exams ($200 each for up to seven tests). The most difficult category, by far, was entering the workforce: only half — 53 percent — earned a reward for sustaining full-time employment ($150 a month) or earning a GED certificate (a lump sum of $400).
To some, these achievements might seem laughably easy, but try passing the GED when your car won’t run, public transit is delayed and you need to get from Memphis to a test prep class across the state line. Add to that scenario the stress of doing it while also worrying about making it back in time to go to work. A monthly $150 reward goes far, especially for a family earning $17,000. But it requires an immeasurable amount of grit and determination to earn.
Family Rewards paid Griffin and her daughter to get better grades in school, go to the doctor’s office and boost working hours — all cash deposited directly to her bank account. “I get excited every time I tell people my story because of where I came from, from having no job to starting over, building myself from the ground up. I don’t think I ever have to worry again,” Griffin gushed as she ran out of the library, where she was studying, to speak to NationSwell by phone. “I don’t know how [Family Rewards] ever got my name, but it was the best thing that ever could have happened to me at that time in my life.”
Critics of the program say that its effectiveness at changing behaviors may be overstated. But anecdotally, participants say they aren’t working for the rewards; it’s the rewards that help them work. Echoing Griffin’s story, one participant tells Politico, “Motivate me? I was already motivated,” says Sheena Lyons, a school cafeteria worker. “I did most of this stuff anyway. My problem is money, not work. I always work.”
Tonya Melton, director of education and employment for youth empowerment programs at Children’s Aid Society, recalled another case of a family struggling with homelessness. Case workers could barely keep track of them as they moved from couches and floors to shelters to apartments. But once the family fully participated in the rewards program, the high schooler earned $530 one year and started community college this fall.
“With welfare, food stamps, [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families], I think there’s constant exploration of the question, ‘How can we maximize the use of funds to motivate people to move out of poverty?’” Melton says. “Does that create long-term change?”
In its current form, the American social safety net is an all-or-nothing system. Unemployment insurance only covers someone until they’re back to work, even if it’s a dead-end, minimum-wage job; there’s little public aid for someone, like Griffin, who wants to rise to middle-class status but needs a second chance at schooling to attain it. The amount of aid ranges from state to state, from a high of $49,175 for a Hawaiian family participating in more than 90 federal anti-poverty programs to a low of $16,984 for the same family in Mississippi, according to a 2013 report by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. A family like Griffin’s in Tennessee is eligible for $17,413 in benefits — about $8.37 an hour if you divide the total over 260 work days, which is higher than the $7.25 minimum wage in the Volunteer State. (Tennessee’s legislature has not adopted a minimum wage, so the federal rate applies.)
Why, some ask, would a person get a job when traditional welfare programs offer significant cash benefits? Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson, on The View last year, said, ”You rob someone of their incentive to go out there and improve themselves.” Contrast that with a small group on the left, like the Food Research & Action Center, who claim our system doesn’t provide enough financial assistance to propel a family out of poverty.
Across the globe, however, conditional cash transfers are becoming the preferred social safety net. After witnessing the inefficiency of distributing staples like milk and tortillas, Mexico rolled out the world’s first conditional cash transfer program in 1997, offering steady payments to roughly 6 million households on the condition that families meet certain requirements, like keeping their children in school and visiting health clinics for regular checkups. Our southern neighbor’s model has since been replicated in 52 countries, including Colombia, Brazil and the Philippines.
Tying progressives’ concern for the poor with conservatives’ emphasis on rejoining the workforce, the model interested Michael Bloomberg, then-mayor of New York City. His thinking: that conditional cash transfers weren’t so different from the Earned Income Tax Credit for working families, and that $40 in the bank each month might prove a more tangible incentive than a distant $1,250 credit next April. Bloomberg decided to test the idea, and in 2007, the Big Apple launched three demonstration projects in six hard-hit neighborhoods.
“The worst thing that can happen is it won’t work and we’ll have to try something else,” Bloomberg reportedly told advisors, wagering millions of dollars from his own foundation and soliciting private funding from big-name groups like the Rockefeller Foundation, insurance giant AIG, Robin Hood Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Institute and more to back $40 million in potential conditional cash transfers.
The initial program distributed only $20.6 million to families. While it achieved had modest gains, particularly in healthcare, opponents said they didn’t justify the cost. “A welfare mother in Central Harlem is not poor for the same reasons that a subsistence corn farmer in Mexico is poor,” Heather MacDonald, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research wrote in a scathing takedown, entitled “Bribery Strikes Out.”
Family Rewards, the most comprehensive of the three pilots, was picked for a second iteration in 2011, in which Griffin was a participant. To focus on achievable results, the number of rewards was pared down from 22. Funded by a Social Innovation Fund grant, the program underwent a rigorous, three-year randomized control trial in which half of the participants received no aid. In Memphis, those receiving rewards had their incomes boosted by $5,442, on average.
Griffin says she’s “furious” the project ended so abruptly last year. She still refers people she meets to Family Rewards, telling them to call any of the caseworkers because she’s sure they would offer some help, like they did when she was at her “breaking point.” While the program may not be a cure-all for poverty’s grip on American cities, it’s a start, especially for motivated mothers like Griffin. “I’m gonna make it. I could make my rent up. I could pay my tuition,” Griffin thought with relief, when she signed up. “I’m going to be okay.”
This Veteran Refuses To Leave His Unemployed and Debt-Ridden Comrades Behind
When Eli Williamson returned from two deployments to the Middle East, his hometown of Chicago felt at times like a foreign battleground, the memory of desert roads more familiar than Windy City central thoroughfares. As he relearned the city, Williamson noticed a strange similarity between veterans like himself and the young people growing up in tough parts of Chicago. Too many had witnessed violence, and they had little support to cope with the trauma.
Applying the timeworn principle of leaving no soldier, sailor, airman or marine behind, Williamson co-founded Leave No Veteran Behind (LNVB), a national nonprofit focused on securing education and employment for our warriors. Williamson formed the organization based on “just real stupid” and “crazy” idealism: “You know what?” he says. “I can make a difference.” Since work began in 2008, with a measly operating budget of $4,674 to help pay off student loans, LNVB has eliminated around $150,000 of school debt and provided 750 transitional jobs, Williamson says.
“Coming out of the military, every individual is going to have his or her challenges,” says Williamson, who served as a psychological operations specialist and an Arabic linguist in Iraq in 2004 and in Afghanistan in 2007. “We’ve seen veterans with substance abuse issues, homelessness issues.” Additionally, at least one in five veterans suffer from PTSD, and almost 50,000 are homeless and 573,000 are unemployed.
Williamson started the group with his childhood friend Roy Sartin. They first met in high school, when they joined choir and band together. “I think we’ve been arguing like old women every since,” Williamson says. Both joined the U.S. Army Reserves while at Iowa’s Luther College and were mobilized to active duty during their senior year after the Twin Towers fell. Williamson finished his education at the Special Warfare Training Center at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, while Sartin put his learning on hold.
Upon return, both struggled with crippling interest rates on their student loans. Sartin received a call from the loan company saying that he needed to make a $20,000 payment. “Although I had the funds, it was just enough to get myself back together. So, for me, the transition wasn’t as tough, but I was one of the lucky ones.” Williamson got a bill for $2,200 only 22 days before the balance was due. Desperate, he took to the streets playing music to cover the costs.
After talking with other vets, the two realized that many didn’t qualify for the military’s debt repayment programs. That’s when they started going out to financial sources for “retroactive scholarships” for our country’s defenders. And they sought employment opportunities for former military members to help cover the rest.
Jobs and debt relief for our nation’s warriors are the main focus of LNVB, but the group oversees several initiatives, including S.T.E.A.M. Corps, which pairs vets with science, technology, engineering, arts, and math experience with at-risk youth. More than 200 students have graduated from S.T.E.A.M., but Williamson, director of veteran affairs at the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, points to a more intangible benefit of his non-profit’s work: the ability for veterans “to articulate a larger vision of themselves … is our advocacy mission,” he says.
“Veterans can paint a vision for where our country needs to be, and the only reason we can do that is because you realize that you are part of something larger than yourself,” Williamson adds. “That’s a fundamental value that veterans can share, as they leave military, with the communities that they come back to.” For those who’ve just returned home from Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, in other words, service is just beginning.
Which U.S. City Is Close to Eliminating Its Food Desert?
Food deserts — areas without access to nutritious food — dot urban areas. As we previously pointed out, attracting a big-box supermarket isn’t the only solution. San Francisco is proving this by adding fresh produce to bodegas that once relied solely on peddling booze and smokes to the community.
The City by the Bay’s comprehensive approach can be traced back to an initiative started nearly 25 years ago. The Food Trust of Philadelphia, one of the most ambitious programs of its kind in one of America’s poorest and most unhealthy big cities, began in a public housing development in South Philly, with volunteers piling mounds of fruits and veggies on one long table outside the project each week. Since 1992, they’ve taken their work beyond that first farmer’s market, improving access to healthy food and nutritional information for nearly 220,000 residents in poor neighborhoods — making Philadelphia one of the first cities to meet the First Lady’s “Let’s Move” challenge to eliminate food deserts entirely by 2017.
“We started to see that farmer’s markets provide seasonal access to fresh fruits and vegetables, not a long-term solution — or the only solution. They really only can open in summer on the East Coast. We realized it was really important to look at the longer term and more comprehensive approaches to food access,” says Candace Young, The Food Trust’s associate director of research and evaluation. Around 2004, “the first thing we did was we mapped out areas of the city that had low access to supermarkets and high-diet related deaths — the pockets of the city that needed better access. We sent that report to policy makers and practitioners, the health community and its advocates, the food retail community. What was built from there was this multi-million dollar public-private initiative to build new or even just renovate supermarkets around the whole state.”
Just how much of a difference can access to fruits and vegetables in a neighborhood actually make? Research shows that living in a food desert isn’t simply an inconvenience for locals or a matter of how long the bus ride will be; it’s linked to serious health problems like obesity, hypertension, heart disease and diabetes. But The Food Trust’s work appears to be making a dent. Between 2006 and 2010, obesity among kids in Philly decreased by five percent — the first downward trend since 1976.
A key aspect of The Food Trust’s work in Pennsylvania involved renovating bodegas — corner stores where the average elementary school student in Philadelphia buys 350 calories worth of food on each visit, according to a 2008 study. More than one quarter — 29 percent — stop in twice a day, five days a week. That means they’re consuming roughly an additional pound of food from this retailer every week.
In response, The Food Trust convinced corner store owners to sell more fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy and whole grains and offered money for renovations. Since the Healthy Corner Store Initiative launched in 2004, it’s established a network of 650 stores. With $30 million in public financing and $90 million in private financing, it can pay for upgrades that are as easy as buying new refrigeration for $500 and as tough as building a whole new mega-mart for several million, Young says. In total, the organization funded 1.67 million square feet of retail development and created 5,000 jobs.
“Corner store owners are a very different business than large supermarkets. They’re a convenience model: you want to get in and out. Oftentimes, you go in to buy chips and a drink, a pack of cigarettes or a lottery ticket,” Young says. “Partly what we’re trying to do is shift to a culture of health around corner stores, where they’re seen again as small grocery venues. Instead of packaged foods, I may need to grab eggs, some milk, some bread and a couple of fruits for me and for my family.”
There’s still some debate about whether these interventions are the best way to deal with food deserts. Some critics point to a lack of causal evidence and say the theory’s “intuitive” underpinnings don’t check out. “If you live next to a Mercedes dealership, that doesn’t mean you’ll buy a Mercedes,” Adam Drewnowski, an epidemiology professor at the University of Washington, tells the Washington Post. “And it’s the same with living next to a grocery store: That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll start eating salads.”
After the first pilot at a handful of stores, The Food Trust documented a 35 percent increase in the sale of healthy items and an even bigger boost — 60 percent — in produce sales. That means $100 in extra profits every week for sellers.
Anecdotally, too, customers seem to be buying. “Now, when I’m talking to people who come into the store, they are asking: What do you have fresh today? And I can say I have apples. I have oranges. I have all kinds of stuff,” says Catalina Morrell-Hunter, one storeowner in North Philadelphia who joined the network after 15 years in business. “We have a refrigerator in the store that we didn’t have before. It has yogurt and fresh fruit and fresh vegetables. And I try to get other products that are better for you, healthier and lower calorie. I’m more conscious of that now.”
The Food Trust’s supporters point to a drop in obesity as evidence something’s clearly working, but they’ll also readily admit fresh food at corner stores isn’t the only explanation. In the City of Brotherly Love, access to fresh and affordable food, amenities for exercise and information to make healthy decisions all go hand-in-hand. Philly’s also added nearly 30 miles of bike lanes, launched a media campaign about sugary drinks that was seen 40 million times and established parent-driven “wellness councils” in 170 public schools.
“We believe that supermarket access is one piece of a comprehensive approach,” says Yael Lehmann, The Food Trust’s executive director. “While bringing in healthy food stores into neighborhoods, we also want to be teaching kids how to eat healthy in schools, we want to be having cooking demonstrations at recreation centers, running farmers’ markets in neighborhoods. All of these things combined is what can improve the health of people and their neighborhoods.”
This 23-Year-Old Has Figured Out a Way to Make Kids Want to Attend Summer School
Thursday morning, 10 a.m. Seventh-grade boys, all young men of color, are hunched over worksheets on subtracting polynomials. (You remember: (x^3 + 4x^2 + 3x – 8) – (5x^3 – 7x^2 – 3x + 2).) Their teacher, a college student at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, asks if anyone needs extra time. Hands go up and mentors — older high schoolers in white shirts — help those who are stuck.
Across the hall, a student from Northwestern University in Illinois is instructing sixth-grade boys on personal essays. A chatty buzz fills in the room as mentors read over first drafts and point out errors to small groups of eager learners.
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The multiple “generations” all working in one classroom — a college student delivering a lesson to middle schoolers, coached by a full-time teacher and assisted by high-school-age aides — makes for an unique sight. But it’s even more unusual at I.S. 392, a highly successful middle school that sticks out from the rest of Brownsville, an area that’s long been known as one of Brooklyn’s poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods. Stranger still, it’s summer. These kids have voluntarily shown up for school while their buddies watch TV or play outside in the windless, 84-degree heat.
The classes are organized through Practice Makes Perfect, a New York City-based enrichment program now in its fifth year. The nonprofit’s goal: To close the achievement gap that creeps in when school’s not in session, says its founder and CEO Karim Abouelnaga. Known as the “summer slide,” researchers found lower-income students forget up to two months of schooling while their higher-income peers participate in summer reading, camps and other enrichment — exacerbating a divide that’s already wide during the regular school year. In Brownsville, Jamaica and the South Bronx, the program is helping 325 students, between third and seventh grade, get a head start on the next school year.
“As structured, summer school does not work,” Abouelnaga recently wrote in a letter to The New York Times. “The choice should not be between sending children to a broken summer school program or not. There is a third way: It means redesigning summer school, and making it challenging and engaging for children and teachers. Students need summer programs with individualized instruction, parental involvement and small classes that keep them from falling behind. They need summer programs where they feel welcome and where they want to learn. They need to be inspired to achieve.”
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The son of Egyptian immigrants, Abouelnaga grew up in Long Island City, Queens. He went to an underperforming high school, where just half of his classmates graduated with a diploma and less than one-fifth were college-ready. He applied to college almost on a whim, sending applications to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (because he’d liked the movie “Good Will Hunting”) and Baruch College, located across the bridge in Manhattan and where he eventually enrolled. Abouelnaga received a 1770 on his SAT, a score that put him in the top percentile for his class in Queens. But when arrived at Baruch, he found that same number placed him in the 70th percentile of his college classmates.
He eventually transferred to Cornell, where with five friends, he decided to start a nonprofit addressing the achievement gap. Nearly two-thirds of the difference between wealthy students and their less well-off counterparts can be tied to summer learning loss. Few nonprofits were working to solve the problem, so Abouelnaga decided to focus his efforts on those crucial months when school’s not in session. He founded the offices for his 12-person team in the neighborhood where he once grew up.
“So many educational initiatives are sympathetic, instead of empathetic,” he says. “I was that kid who sat here, even though I was blessed with an elite education. I bring a unique perspective.”
On a recent site visit to I.S. 392, Abouelnaga is dressed in a navy blue pinstripe suit, purple tie and matching purple pocket square — business attire that he says sets “an expectation of excellence” for his students. At 23 years old, he projects high ambitions for himself and the growing organization. He wants to completely reform a disciplinary or remedial punishment into an exciting opportunity. He wants kids asking parents to sign them up for summer classes.
“Our brand is relationship-driven. There’s so much emphasis on technology and testing, that we can forget how much relationships matter in education,” he says. “Our mentors are what keeps kids coming back here.”
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The walls of Practice Makes Perfect classrooms are decorated with posters. In bright marker, there’s the expected motivational phrases and standard ground rules (“Respect your classmates,” “If you want to be heard, RAISE YOUR HANDS”) along with some tougher expectations (“Goals: Must have 80% mastery in ELA” — English Language Arts — “and Math”). Beside that are poems written by the young boys. A representative quatrain sounds like this: “I remember the night when I ran from the bullet. / All I heard was clik-clak POW, it was more than five bullets. / I was running non-stop, hoping I didn’t get hit. / I was sprinting so fast that I almost tripped.” Another: “People think that black men won’t / accomplish anything but / that’s not true. / White men beat slaves till they were / black and blue.”
Rather than avoiding current events, Abouelnaga and his team have made them an essential part of the curriculum. Students read recent articles deemed newsworthy, like about the merits of body cameras for police officers. It’s all part of boosting Common Core test scores, which Practice Makes Perfect tries to measure rigorously. Every Thursday, teachers input students’ scores into a system to track progress and identify those that may be in need of more targeted intervention with the help of the mentors.
Through Practice Makes Perfect’s rigorous and engaging curriculum, students so far have made tangible academic gains. Last year, the middle school math scores improved by three percent, on average, and reading by seven percent; the high school mentors, who study the SAT before and after the youngsters show up, improved their scores on the college admission test by an average of 170 points.
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But the program is about more than scores; empowerment is one of its core values. Abouelnaga’s summer school creates a permanently visible institution for the surrounding community, instead of empty hallways and classrooms — in Abouelnaga’s words, “unused real estate.” The children spend at least one day on a community service project, which demonstrates they can “make a difference in their neighborhood.” Some kids in Brownsville picked up trash around their school, one group in Bushwick volunteered at a community center and another class in Jamaica did group activities with younger kids.
Practice Makes Perfect is also creating ties between generations, in the hopes that middle-school students eventually come back as mentors in high school and advise everyone else once they’re off to college. It’s part of the reason why Abouelnaga has his college students do home visits before they start teaching — to break and confirm stereotypes and to create ties with the community.
What’s next for the organization? “There’s 1.1 million schoolchildren in New York City,” Abouelnaga says. “We haven’t even scratched the surface.”
Poverty Is a Way of Life in Appalachia. But This State Proves That It Doesn’t Have to Be
In 1973, 180 coal miners in Harlan County, Ky., stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the picket line. They had been arrested and beaten with nightsticks; their wives had lain down in front of trucks and been thrown in jail by state troopers. Repeating the struggle their fathers waged during strikes in 1931 that earned the county the moniker “Bloody Harlan,” these miners, employees of Duke Power-owned Brookside Mines, endured 13 months of fighting for the right to unionize and earn a living wage, around $45 a day.
One young miner on strike, 23-year-old Lawrence Jones, died — shot by a mine supervisor — before coal operators caved to national pressure and accepted a new union contract. Even then, victory was short-lived. Just 30 years later, there’s not a single union miner working in Harlan County; in fact, there’s no union miners left in all of Kentucky, a region of Central Appalachia once considered the heart of coal country.
The story of Central Appalachia has a recurring plot line: economic boom, devastating bust, public acknowledgement, government assistance, boom, bust….and repeat. Last May, when President Barack Obama announced the launch of Promise Zones, an economic redevelopment plan to bring federal dollars to five regions with persistent poverty, those in Kentucky (the first rural pilot) recalled programs from other commanders in chief: FDR’s Works Progress Administration, Johnson’s War on Poverty and Clinton’s Empowerment Zones. Would this redevelopment be any different? Could it finally drag the mountain region out of poverty?
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A single-industry economy in southeastern Kentucky has led to a reliance on mining at the expense of all else. Even the area’s professional class — consisting of lawyers, bankers and doctors (some who certified or denied claims for disability and Black Lung benefits) — built their businesses around mining. For low-wage workers, coal mining promised decent work, often without the need for multiple diplomas, part of the reason why eastern Kentucky has no major research institution. The land has suffered, too. As strip mining became the cheapest way to extract coal, virgin hillsides were slashed and rarely replaced, leading to erosion and floods.
But natural resources run out — or become inaccessible. In Kentucky’s case, there’s still plenty of coal underground, but it’s too costly and environmentally damaging to extract it. As the Environmental Protection Agency tightens its regulations in what some call a “War on Coal,” the state has lost 7,000 direct mining jobs since 2012. Among residents of counties bordering Harlan, it’s said there’s a month-long wait to get a U-Haul because so many people are leaving town. The rumor’s unfounded (you can get a truck tomorrow), but it speaks to the worry that neighbors are fleeing, a fear of being stuck behind since no money means no development — in infrastructure or human capital. Fourth-generation coal miners in Harlan are hanging up their helmets and moving to urban areas with better employment prospects. The county’s population fell from a height of 75,275 to its lowest since 1920, currently around 28,000.
That’s not to say everything has been stagnant in the half-century since John F. Kennedy, a young senator from New England, first drew national attention to Central Appalachia on the presidential campaign trail. There’s been “progress in reducing isolation and providing assistance” for development, says Kostas Skordas, director of regional planning and research for the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal-state commission created in 1965, but the pace at which improvements happen is much slower than elsewhere in the nation. “Challenges still remain. Rural areas may progress, but in many cases, metro areas are progressing faster. The gap between Appalachian communities and the rest of the country has grown larger. Education is an example of that, health is an example of that.”
Appalachia is paying the price “in providing the cheap power that built the modern American economy,” Jason Bailey, director of the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, tells the Associated Press. ”The region has paid it in spoiled water and degraded land and black lung disease, broken backs, torn-up roads, blasted mountains,” issues that make it harder to rebuild a diversified economy.
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A region suffering from decades of persistent poverty due to an exploitative history of resource extraction is nothing new. (There’s the Black Belt of plantations from Maryland to Texas, the Mississippi River Delta, the Texas Colonias along the Mexican border and Indian Country in the Four Corners and the Dakotas, to name a few.) And of course, long before cheap coal ran out, the Iron Belt began rusting. But one state has been working for nearly 75 years to prepare mining towns for the inevitable day when resources run dry.
Minnesota’s Iron Range Resource and Rehabilitation Board (IRRRB), a regional economic development agency, was founded by the state legislature in 1941 as a direct response to the one-sector economy in northeastern Minnesota falling apart during the Great Depression.
“Northeastern Minnesota has historically been largely dependent on a single industry, iron ore mining,” Mark Phillips, commissioner of IRRRB, tells NationSwell in an email. “The jobs of thousands of people and the economies of dozens of communities across the region have relied on iron ore mining and are impacted by technology or market changes within the industry.”
Iron-ore mining was once so pervasive in the region that a powdery, deep red dust blanketed entire towns — houses, cars, clothes. Today, IRRRB’s work is considered a public leader in pioneering economic diversification, land reclamation and social services like workforce development. Regional planning by the state agency enabled coordinated development, drawing federal attention and funding — bringing about long-term success that wouldn’t have been possible with isolated efforts.
That’s not to say there haven’t been missteps along the way. In the ’40s, one strategy they chose — diversifying mining operations by expanding from iron to taconite — was a booming success; agricultural experiments cultivating berries, rutabagas and potatoes, on the other hand, largely proved a bust. Eventually, timber (reviving forests that had been logged) and tourism (taking advantage of the state’s 10,000 lakes) developed as profitable sectors. Money paid for new educational facilities, focusing in particular on postsecondary vocational training.
IRRRB’s investment in human capital (something lacking in Appalachia, studies have shown) — education and workforce development — has paid off large dividends. “IRRRB programs and projects have helped existing businesses in the region remain competitive, helped attract a wide range of new jobs and companies to northeastern Minnesota,” Phillips says. Their work “increased the region’s quality of life within communities and assisted in supporting innovative educational programs in our schools and colleges.”
Kentucky’s Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat in office since 2007, and a congressman, U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, an 18-term Republican, heard about Minnesota’s success. Working together on a federal-state partnership to redefine southeastern Kentucky (Shaping Our Appalachian Region or SOAR), they held a conference for roughly 2,000 people from across the rural area, remembers Gerry Roll, executive director of Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky, a philanthropic community foundation. Those in attendance heard this message: “Coal is still important, it’ll be around for a while, but we need to start thinking beyond that. We need to think about new ideas, with broadband, with infrastructure, with things that will bring people to our region.”
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It became a watershed moment. “All of a sudden, everybody in the room was saying we need to do something different. We have to work together and work harder. I think there was an acknowledgment — not only from a Democrat and a Republican talking to each other, but old people and young people, environmentalists and coal miners talking to each other — that we may not agree on everything, but we need to start where we can,” Roll says. “I think the SOAR initiative gave us permission to think more broadly, outside of our usual box, and the economy was really an opportunity for us to say we’re better together. These 120 little fiefdoms that Kentucky has aren’t going to make it alone.”
The hardscrabble miners in Harlan County once proved that organizing into a union could win them major concessions from the coal mine operators. Now, a hard push for bottom-up change through Obama’s Promise Zones could once again prove the power of banding together.
READ MORE:
Part 2: The Initiative That’s Bringing Appalachia into the 21st Century
Part 3: Stories of Redemption in America’s Coal Country
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The Common Sense Move That Reduced California’s Teen Pregnancy Rate by 60 Percent
In 1991, within the course of a single year, close to 16 out of every 100 teenage girls in California became pregnant — a rate that ranked among the worst in the country (the national average was 6.18 births for every 100 teens) and far exceeded those of other developed countries, sometimes by double digits.
Staggering as those statistics were, there’s been an equally stunning development in the 20 years since. By 2011, the teen pregnancy rate nationwide dropped 37 percent, and by more than half in the Golden State, a decline that’s “one of the nation’s great but unheralded success stories of the past two plus decades,” says Bill Albert, chief program officer for The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.
Despite the drastic drop in teen pregnancies, the fact remains uncelebrated — perhaps because no one can pinpoint exactly how it happened. Researchers haven’t yet explained how so many states’ divergent (and sometimes contradictory) strategies could consistently result in such steep declines.
The simple explanation? A “magic combination of less sex and more contraception,” as Albert puts it. But that only begs the question, What changed about the way teens have sex?
Studies point to a number of cultural factors. Some claim that mandatory sex education in schools after the AIDS crisis increased use of contraception. Others cite welfare reform and the strong economy. One hypothesis holds that MTV’s reality shows “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom” discouraged sex with their gritty looks at the challenges of childbearing at a young age. Another theory says kids saw their parents marrying and having children later in life, so they likewise didn’t experiment until they were older and perhaps more mature.
A hard look at California’s programs, however, may reveal the best practices and a model to adopt nationwide. After all, the state is leading the way in reducing all three key areas — teen pregnancy, births and abortions. It’s “the undisputed heavyweight champion of prevention,” Albert remarks.
The Golden State, as a whole, saw teen birth rates drop by 60 percent from their peak in 1991. That number reflects improvement across all races; Hispanic teens still have the highest rate (4.27 births per 100 female teens), but it’s down 42 percent in the past 10 years.
Many public health officials point to the state’s sex education as an essential element in their multi-pronged approach. State law passed in 2003 requires the education to be “comprehensive, medically accurate and age- and culturally-appropriate.” Within the context of preventing HIV/AIDS, California teaches abstinence, but otherwise says abstinence-only education is “not permitted” in public schools. (It’s the only state in the union that didn’t accept lucrative federal dollars tied to “abstinence-only-until-marriage” programs included in a 1996 welfare reform package, after the state found its own pilot ineffective compared to one that included information on contraceptives.)
From there, the state’s approach focuses on access to healthcare, pioneering an innovative funding model that allows teen patients at hospitals or community clinics to qualify as their own household, making them eligible to receive public assistance for their medical expenses.
Additionally, California takes a more personalized approach to the social issues that surround — and lead to — teen pregnancy by helping local school districts and community healthcare providers tailor their programs to specific geographic areas. There’s vast differences, for example, in urban, affluent San Francisco and the rural farmlands of the San Joaquin Valley, where teen pregnancy rates still double those of the Bay Area.
“The problem isn’t the across-the-board teen birth rate in California, it’s the inequities that are revealed when you look at the rate,” Alison Chopel, senior program manager of the California Adolescent Health Collaborative and champion of the effort, says. “Why are black girls and Latina girls having babies younger than white girls? It’s because of the opportunity landscape that’s available to them.”
For Chopel, the need to customize the programs is very personal. As a teenager, she saw herself becoming another statistic. Raised in a poor household, she struggled with schoolwork, took drugs to cope, failed her classes and barely graduated from high school. College didn’t seem to be in her future, especially not after she had a baby boy. “I didn’t mean to get pregnant,” she says, “but I meant to have him.”
With the help of a Pell Grant, she graduated from college and went on to graduate school to study public health. She came to recognize the wide scope of factors contributing to unintended pregnancies: family structure, education, poverty, access to healthcare, race and culture.
Recently, public health advocates have questioned whether a baby is really the cause of the negative life outcomes — dropping out of school, living in poverty, depending on food stamps — for teen moms or whether they would have been just as likely to end up there because of their upbringing. (Chopel points to new research showing that young mothers from impoverished backgrounds may actually perform better than their peers because they receive family support and are motivated to succeed for their child’s sake.) Poverty, in other words, isn’t a symptom of unwanted teen pregnancies. If anything, it’s the cause.
California’s “innovative” strategies and community-based partnerships worked: they’re “helping young women and men make responsible choices,” says Dr. Ron Chapman, director of the state’s public health department, so the state is focused on continuing to make prevention programs available. “In all communities,” Chapman adds emphatically.
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Suspending Students Isn’t Effective. Here’s What Schools Should Do Instead
A decade ago, 60 percent of students at one South Los Angeles middle school were suspended at some point during the school year. Out of 1,958 sixth, seventh and eight graders, 1,189 were written up for drugs, violence or class disruptions. But this zero-tolerance discipline policy didn’t have the desired effects. Troubled kids isolated themselves, academics lagged and enrollment sharply declined.
Led by a new principal and funded by a federal grant, Audubon Middle School and Gifted Magnet Center, an inner-city junior high school with one of the largest proportions of African-American students in L.A., joined the growing movement of implementing restorative justice in schools: Instead of simply penalizing misbehavior, the strategy involves talking through the reasons why a child is acting out. Prioritizing resolution over retribution, it’s all about keeping kids in school while maintaining the best learning environment. Audubon has taken the idea to a whole new level. Last school year, out of 827 middle school students, only 13 were booted from class — an astonishing 98.9 percent drop from 10 years ago.
In this community, too many African American and Hispanic students fall victim to a life of crime and end up imprisoned, says Kevin Dailey, a behavior intervention specialist with 31 years of experience at Audubon. “People are behind the gray walls because they don’t know how to communicate or because they didn’t have those supportive relationships,” he explains. “We have to do whatever we can to keep them out of that. Knowing how to communicate, how to listen and how to speak from the heart are very important.” In his mind, communication is the difference between being facedown on the ground in handcuffs and enrolled in college.
Restorative justice teaches those skills primarily through something’s known as a “peace circle.” After an incident — whether it be mouthing off in class or shoving a student in the hall — the kids in the classroom talk about what happened over cups of hot chocolate. Rather than referring to “the victim” and “the perpetrator,” which establishes permanent roles for the kids, the circles focus on the action — “the harm” — and how it affects both students. As a small totem is passed around (determining who can speak), all of the participants try to arrive at some consensus for how to address the behavior moving forward.
Sure, there may be consequences, but that’s no longer the focus. Suspensions are now used very selectively because educators don’t want kids to fall behind in their studies. If there is a serious problem, administrators now find it’s better to hold conferences with parents and, if necessary, refer the student to anger management classes or other counseling.
“I don’t know if this is the definitive terminology in the textbooks, but what we see in action is restorative justice means giving kids an opportunity to speak their minds, to listen to them and agree on the next step,” explains Charmaine Young, the school’s principal since 2012. “We’re taking the punitive power of the referral slip and getting to the why of the behavior.”
It’s also why Young encourages teachers to get to know kids outside of the classroom — so they can understand them as young people with personalities and ambitions, rather than just as students who perform well or falter academically. She believes that teachers need to balance academic instruction with social development, like a seesaw. A class can’t be all fun and games, but it also can’t be entirely lessons, Young says. Students are more willing to learn if they feel the teachers actually care about them personally.
That’s where the new policies come into play: if there’s a problem in class, teachers will tailor the response to a student’s unique situation, rather than worrying about getting back to the lesson plan. It’s why administrators no longer issue suspensions for not wearing a uniform, for example, and instead ask if the student’s family has money for the right clothes.
Restorative justice isn’t a new concept, but its adoption is gaining traction, particularly in the Golden State. Last year, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing required all new principals and administrators to receive training on positive school discipline, and in September, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the nation’s first law eliminating suspensions for young children (grades K-3) for minor incidents like talking back or showing up without school materials. Los Angeles Unified School District went one step further and said that no student in any grade should ever be suspended for “willful defiance,” a catch all offense (outside of two dozen specific categories like bullying and possessing drugs) that had been disproportionately targeted at minorities.
We must “change direction, keep all children in all schools and invest in restoring our children’s sense of purpose, despite so many institutions wanting to throw them away,” says Roslyn Broadnax, a core parent leader of CADRE, a group of minority parents with kids in South L.A. schools. “Over the past 10 years, we have begun to chip away at the belief that removing children of color from school for minor behavior, and leaving them vulnerable to harm and disconnected from the classroom, somehow improves our school safety and test scores.”
Recently, one boy in the after-school program at Audubon accidentally hit a fire alarm, disrupting a school site council meeting. A star basketball player, the youngster was worried he wasn’t going to be able to play in the upcoming league games. The very next morning, he arrived at the main office at 6:45 a.m. — more than an hour before the first bell rings at 8 a.m. — and sat in a chair waiting for the principal to arrive. “I just wanna know, Ms. Young, if I can have a cup of hot chocolate and explain what happened?” he asked. “Before you hear it from anyone else,” he added.
“Who does that?” Young wonders aloud. These are the kind of young adults Audubon is nurturing: kids who can own up to their mistakes or ask for help when it’s needed. Either way, the graduates will be students who know how to speak up for themselves.
Young points out a recent example of their success: Last year, the valedictorians at several L.A. high schools were all alums of Audubon.
How Do Young Men Become Better Fathers? They Attend This Boot Camp
At 17 years of age, Kaeran Reyes-Little became a father.
Growing up in Queens, N.Y. — dad gone, mom working long shifts at the hospital — Reyes-Little found himself hanging with an older crowd, getting in trouble with the law. “I think that was God’s way of saying slow down,” he says of the birth of his son, Darius.
Even though he had just crossed into adulthood, Reyes-Little refused to perpetuate his own dad’s mistakes, to repeat the cycle. He took full custody of his son and tattooed his name across his forearm. Most mornings, Reyes-Little woke up at 4 a.m., wrestling with anxiety. “Why did I have a kid so early?” he’d ask himself. “I didn’t get to build a foundation before having to lay my son’s. What am I going to do?”
Through his older brother, Reyes-Little heard about Fatherhood Academy, a City University of New York program aiming to stop the downward spiral in broken families. Despite being apprehensive at first, he signed up. What he found there was a revelation: “Life’s not over. You’re still somebody,” he recalls hearing. “When you’re a single parent, you’re in a bubble already. It takes another parent to understand what that feels like. And this is not just parents, but fathers.”
Across New York City, 749,000 kids are raised by single parents. With the help of Fatherhood Academy — an initiative that was put on hold this spring due to uncertain funding — dozens of young dads like Reyes-Little are learning how to make a better life for their children.
As a member of the program, Reyes-Little earned his high school diploma at 19. And with some prodding, he enrolled in community college, where he’s now pulling a 3.0 GPA. Pursuing a passion for science that’s been with him since childhood, he’s specializing in marine biology.
“I’m a geek at heart,” he reveals, an admission that doesn’t sound strange through his wide grin, but on second thought, makes you pause. Did this tattooed 24-year-old with a rap sheet just say that? This guy, who was once so angry at his father, so bitter because it seemed anyone would betray him for a price, really just fess up to being a science nerd? And then, in case you didn’t hear him at first, Reyes-Little laughs and says, “My son’s the same way.”
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For generations, New York City has been the destination for those hoping for a brand new start. But for all of Sinatra’s crooning, the city rarely offers those possibilities to its own children — particularly those in impoverished neighborhoods. In the Bronx, 44 percent of kids are raised below the poverty line, and in Brooklyn, one in three won’t graduate from high school.
Unlike traditional parenting services (which are usually aimed at single mothers), Fatherhood Academy is, as its name indicates, just for dads. Through several weeks of high school equivalency (HSE) test-prep classes, workshops and mentoring, New York City’s young men learn to become better parents and start on the path towards a college degree or a stable career.
“Fathers are the mentors for their children. If they’re in a different situation economically and mentally, those improvements are so huge,” says Raheem Brooks, the program’s coordinator. “We want to stop this cycle that’s been going on in their families, because they’re training the future leaders of our city.”
With flyers posted in housing projects, Fatherhood Academy targets young men between the ages of 18 and 24. An open enrollment policy (meaning no application questions inquire about criminal history) results in a mix of dads from all over the city. Several still live with the child’s mom, some share custody and an increasing number are single dads raising newborns alone. But they all share an automatic respect for each other as fathers.
“They all want something better for their children, but they don’t know how to get it,” says David Speal, counselor and case manager for Fatherhood Academy. “They just need that understanding and guidance.”
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The program operates out of the continuing education center at LaGuardia Community College in Queens. There’s a persistent bustle in its bright, second-floor office as students drop off forms and ask the secretaries for help (even after being tsk-tsk’ed for wearing hoods inside). The door is always open, even during meetings when it stays slightly ajar.
Brooks and Speal, the two men behind the program, are an odd couple. Brooks is an imposing figure: He’s tall, African-American and sports dreadlocks that fall below his wide shoulder blades. Born in Detroit, he began his career in East Harlem as a “follow-up specialist,” which essentially meant knocking on doors to find the at-risk guys who’d missed appointments.
Beside him, Speal is white, slender and earnestly enthused, like a grown-up camp counselor. A lifelong resident of Queens, he started volunteering at Rikers Island, NYC’s main correctional facility, while enrolled at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and was later hired as a case manager there. During one counseling session, a young inmate told Speal, “I gotta go. I got special permission.” “For what?” Speal asked. “To visit my father. He’s in the dorm down the hall.” Fatherhood Academy wasn’t born that moment, but Speal says witnessing the ensnaring cycle firsthand invigorates his work today.
“They don’t want the same thing that happened to them to be true for their kids,” Speal explains.
“The conversations have already changed,” Brooks chimes in. “Our guys can say, ‘Hey, let’s go do homework.’ Suddenly, it’s ‘Daddy’s going to college,’ rather than ‘Daddy’s not around.’ It’s a different dynamic that they never had.”
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Fatherhood Academy begins with a three-week “boot camp” to test commitment and gauge the group’s educational level, then jumps right into 13 weeks of training for the HSE test. Since classes are held on a college campus, dads become accustomed to the feel of higher education. “Rather than just stop here and get my GED, they can see, ‘I’m among young people that look similar to me. I can do that,’” Brooks says.
Afternoons focus on parenting topics. Nonprofits and motivational speakers give presentations on how to cook on a budget (think: a tasty pineapple chicken recipe), balance a budget or administer CPR. In smaller groups, the dads have wide-ranging discussions that touch on everything from changing diapers to relationships with family. “Men don’t have these conversations, you know, talking about feelings towards their father, how they were raised and the values we are going to have in our children,” Brooks says.
Fathers are the mentors for their children…We want to stop this cycle that’s been going on in their families, because they’re training the future leaders of our city.”
— Raheem Brooks, Fatherhood Academy
Those conversations build a brotherhood that provides support when members face with bigger challenges: “homelessness, not enough to eat, issues with the mother, visitation and custody, drug addiction and alcohol, anger, just different things,” Brooks says. Many of these trials aren’t new, but now the men’s responses have changed. “We’re noticing that the guys are seeing a different version of themselves now,” Brooks says. “They bought into the program and into the possibilities for their own growth.”
It all concludes with a cap-and-gown ceremony, a first for many. With five cohorts now completed, the program has graduated 136 men. Fifty-nine of the dads passed the HSE test, 21 of whom are now in college. More than half — 80 fathers — were placed in jobs, and another 35 landed internships.
By all counts, the program has been successful, but for months, Fatherhood Academy hasn’t held a class. Launched by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2012 as part of the Young Men’s Initiative, the initial seed grants from the Bloomberg Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundation ran dry, and the program wasn’t included in the most recent budget issued by Mayor Bill DeBlasio. “Here’s a program that actually works, and now the funding has vanished like a deadbeat dad,” a reporter at the New York Daily News wrote in October, noting that the $550,000 budget is roughly the same as housing 10 inmates at Rikers for a year.
“It was tough. We know these guys individually, so it’s really personal,” Brooks states. “Guys would call you saying, ‘Hey, can I be in your next cohort?’ and you’d have to tell them, ‘We’re not going to be around, but I’ll take your name down.’”
Good news came from City Hall last month, when Brooks and Speal found out that Fatherhood Academy is set to become an official city program funded in the next budget cycle. They’re planning to start the next session this summer. Meaning that soon, 60 young dads will be receiving a call with good news: The academy is back in session.