Education Secretary Arne Duncan

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan came to Los Angeles today to shine a light on a White House initiative that takes a holistic approach to helping kids learn.

Duncan joined LA Unified Superintendent John Deasy and a group of teachers, students and leaders of the Youth Policy Institute at a community center in Hollywood. The center is part of the city’s two LA Promise Neighborhoods — Pacoima has the other — which include 19 full-service LA Unified community schools and six community centers, like the one Duncan and Deasy visited.

The Promise Neighborhoods, supported by a $30 million grant from the Obama administration, is one of President Obama’s signature education and poverty initiatives, to “transform schools and communities into vibrant centers of excellence and opportunity.” The idea behind it is to centralize community and educational services in one comprehensive program to serve families, with schools at the center of the agency networks.

They are modeled after the Harlem Children’s Zone, which fosters a “cradle-to-career” continuum of services. In Los Angeles, the centers are run in partnership with LA Unified, providing a wide array of wrap-around services, including job training for parents and teens, after-school tutoring, parenting classes and day care services.

Duncan listened as students and parents, their voices often trembling with emotion, expressed gratitude for the much needed support the centers and schools now provide after years of devastating district and city budget cuts.

“These resources are not a gift,” he told the crowd. “They’re an investment.”

“This is a community where things aren’t necessarily very easy by any stretch of the imagination, but this is an entire community that’s come together behind its young people to create a seamless network of opportunities that I’m convinced can help transform their life chances,” he said during a press conference after the meeting.

With the program still in early stages, Duncan stressed the importance of “tracking data, looking at metrics, being honest with ourselves” to expand the initiative in greater scale.

“We think this community has a chance to do something of national significance,” he told them. “I’m very interested in figuring out what works and how to do more of it.”

The administration plans to expand the program to 20 target areas, from the current five, across the country over the next three years.

Steve Zimmer, the LA Unified board member whose district include the Hollywood center, worked on the project and participated in the event.

“It is important for the Secretary to see what schools and communities can achieve when they collaborate with one another instead of competing against each other,” he said. “In case the Secretary had any doubts, he can now report that the American Dream is alive and well at the corner of Santa Monica and Western. And ultimately, that is what the Promise Neighborhoods program is all about.

*Adds Zimmer quote

That might be about to change.

In a presentation to the LA Unified School Board on Tuesday, SEIU local 99 Executive Director Courtni Pugh laid out a vision to better connect community services to schools. Dubbed OASIS, for Optimizing Access to Services, Inspiring Success, the plan aims to turn local schools sites into a hub of community services, such as park space, libraries, health care providers and technology.

“Not everyone enters the classroom in the morning with the same experiences the night before,” Pugh told LA School Report. “We have to recognize that a child’s day does not start and end in the classroom.”

It is, by her own admission, not a new idea. Earlier this year, the Youth Policy Institute launched an initiative called Los Angeles Promise Neighborhoods, which aims to fuse a variety of anti-poverty services into one program centered around a school. (The idea was inspired by the Harlem Children’s Zone.)

Pugh’s goal is to set up six to 12 OASIS schools within LAUSD starting in the next school year. She hopes the project will get funding from a range of sources, including the City of Los Angeles, LA Unified and non-profits.

At Tuesday’s meeting, school board members were practically falling over themselves to praise Pugh’s idea.

“I love this,” said Steve Zimmer. “This is what we should be doing.” Even Monica Ratliff, against whom Local 99 campaigned heavily against last year, thought the plan was “fantastic.”

Pugh, a former political director of the powerful LA County Federation of Labor, has headed Local 99 for just over a year. She was also recently named the chair of SEIU International’s education council. From that platform, she is wading into the education reform debate, staking out a middle ground between charter school advocates and teachers unions.

“The debate on reform is false and silo-ed,” she said.

More than half of her members have children that go to LA Unified schools, she said, and the majority of them live within 2.5 miles of schools they work in. Not only will OASIS create jobs (some, presumably, for her members), but her members will benefit from the services it creates.

In a sense, OASIS grew out of Breakfast in the Classroom, an LA Unified program that provides, well, breakfast in the classroom. It has been heavily criticized by many teachers, who said it distracted students and left a mess. But when Superintendent John Deasy put the program to the board for a vote, hundreds of service workers rallied to support it, and the normally divided board unanimously voted to continue the service.

“That was a fight that we thought was for the moral good,” said Pugh. “Our members, many of them are part of the working poor that stood to move further down the food chain if they lost their jobs.”

Pugh expects getting OASIS off the ground to be even tougher.

“This is a humongous undertaking – very complex, multiple layers and a lot of red tape involved,” she said. “It’s a big step for us.”

Previous posts: Slideshow: Deasy’s Cafeteria Shift; Deasy’s School Breakfast Gambit Confuses Supporters; Campaign 2013: How Ratliff Won (& Reformers Lost)*; Local 99, LAUSD’s “Other” Labor Union

Educational efforts in Los Angeles are in the process of expanding beyond the classroom and touching community members of all ages with a wide variety of services not usually offered at typical Los Angeles school sites.

The Los Angeles-based nonprofit group Youth Policy Institute (YPI) received a $30 million dollar grant from the federal government this year to invest in education, job training, healthcare and various public safety initiatives in two Los Angeles neighborhoods long plagued by high dropout rates, violence and poverty.

The YPI award, which could potentially be matched by private donors as well, is intended to create a network of 65 programs for students and their families in the so-called Los Angeles Promise Neighborhoods of Pacoima, San Fernando and the Little Armenia area of Hollywood. The program will serve young children with health-care and preschool opportunities and their older siblings with tutoring and college counseling. Parents and family members will be offered English classes, selected job training and help managing household finances as well.

YPI hopes to reach 18,000 kids a year at 19 LA Unified and charter schools. In 2010, due to its 30 years of offering place-based initiatives throughout city, YPI was chosen by the U.S. Department of Education to lay the framework for how it might spend the $30 million dollars, and 18 months later, became one of 11 organizations to receive a grant from the Obama administration.

Previous Posts:  “Promise Neighborhoods” Finally Launch in LA, Oakland Expands “Community Schools” Model*

The Promise Neighborhoods idea was popularized by Geoffrey Canada’s New York City effort (called the Harlem Children’s Zone), then picked up by the Obama Administration.  It features “cradle-to-grave” social services focused on a particular geographic area.

Late last year, the Los Angeles Promise Neighborhood was awarded $30 million by the US Department of Education.  According to the announcement letter (attached below), the LA effort will provide wraparound social services to families in Hollywood and Pacoima including efforts to change 19 neighborhood schools into neighborhood centers with extended hours and offerings for adults as well as children.  The award, expected to serve 18,000 youth per year, was just one of seven grants given this year and will be announced formally in upcoming weeks.