Dept of Ed Announces ‘Promise Neighborhoods’ Planning Grantees

Earlier today, the U.S. Department of Education announced the 21 recipients of Promise Neighborhoods planning grants. Of those winners, 11 mention partnering with a pre-k or early childhood program or focusing on early childhood or pre-k services in their application summaries.

The Promise Neighborhoods program started with $10 million to be distributed this fiscal year in grants of up to $500,000 each. According to documents on the Department of Ed website, recipients will be granted between $312,000 and $500,000 each. The full text of the applications are not yet available to the public. But summaries of the winning application are now available on data.ed.gov.

Early Ed Watch scanned the summaries this afternoon to see which Promise Neighborhood winners included the parenting, infant, toddler and pre-k programs that are among the hallmarks of the Harlem Children’s Zone, the precursor to the Promise Neighborhoods program.  Here is a list of the winning applicants who, given what we know from the summaries, seem poised to focus on the years before kindergarten. (Once full text of the applications are available it will be easier to deduce which applicants are also focused on improving the early grades of elementary school and encouraging alignment across the full birth-to-age-8 spectrum. Stay tuned.)

• Abyssinian Development Corporation, (New York City, Harlem, NY)
• Athens Clarke County Family Connection Inc (Athens-Clarke County, GA)
• Community Day Care Center of Lawrence, Inc. (Lawrence, MA)
• Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (Boston, MA)
• Lutheran Family Health Centers / Lutheran Medical Center (New York City, Brooklyn)
• Neighborhood Centers Inc. (Houston, TX)
• Proyecto Pastoral at Dolores Mission (Los Angeles, CA)
• United Way of Central Massachusetts, Inc. (Worcester, MA)
• United Way of San Antonio & Bexar County — Partners for Community Change (San Antonio, TX)
• Westminster Foundation (Buffalo, NY)
• Youth Policy Institute (Los Angeles, CA)

In announcing the winners, U.S. Secretary for Education Arne Duncan joined U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan and the Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council Melody Barnes. The Secretaries and the Director emphasized that a lot of interagency cooperation is taking place with the Promise Neighborhoods and other neighborhood revitalization programs. Barnes remarked that, “people don’t live in silos,” so neither should government agencies.

As we learn more about the grantees, Early Ed Watch will be looking more closely at what services for young children and their families are expected to take place in Promise Neighborhoods. We should note, however, that these grants are only planning grants – they are not expected to fund full implementation of programs. President Obama requested $210 million to fund the program in fiscal year 2011, but so far the appropriations committees in Congress have voted on much lower levels of funding.

For today, we’d like to point to one grantee whose application is of particular interest: the United Way of San Antonio & Bexar County – Partners for Community Change. Aside from partnering with local early childhood programs and family services (which many grantees plan to do), their Eastside Promise Neighborhood includes a partnership with Trinity University to focus on, “high quality professional development services to enable effectiveness in preschool and school staff.” This desire to both provide early childhood programs and train high quality providers sounds like a truly comprehensive approach to starting young children on a path to breaking the poverty cycle in their neighborhoods, as the Promise Neighborhoods grant program is attempting to do.