The money comes to the district from the Youth Policy Institute, one of 13 organizations around the country that won a Partners in Progress grant to increase economic progress in low-income communities.

For LA Unified, the money will support a district employee based at the YPI Pacoima Community Center and charged with helping area students stay in school or return after dropping out. YPI is also using grant money to fund two YPI jobs designed to identify and expand public-private partnerships in community development.

“A lot of schools have these kinds of counselors,” said Heather Fukunaga, YPI’s assistant director of development. “But by placing this position out of a school, it helps create a further reach to help more students and families.”

The Youth Policy Institute works to reduce poverty in LA neighborhoods by ensuring families have access to high quality schools, wrap-around education and technology services.

Each grant recipient has committed to initiate or deepen efforts to improve neighborhoods and create pathways to economic opportunity. Partners in Progress calls the $3.25 million grant program “a quarterback model.”

“Recognizing that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to improving economic opportunity, we know the quarterback model works to align smart approaches with smart financing,” said Nancy O. Andrews, President and CEO of LIIF. “Through Partners in Progress, we hope to build a movement. By creating a network of quarterbacks, we can promote learning and formalize a strategy that will fundamentally change our field for decades to come.”

Among the grant recipients are three other LA-based groups — BRIDGE Housing Corporation, LINC Housing and Little Tokyo Service Center.

Previous Posts: Youth Policy Institute Leads Way On LA Promise Neighborhood; “Promise Neighborhoods” Finally Launch in LA.

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*

Headed by the Youth Policy Institute (or YPI), it aims to serve 18,000 kids in two neighborhoods — Hollywood and Pacoima — and hopes to expand even further in the future.

The idea behind LA’s Promise Neighborhoods is to provide a comprehensive approach to anti-poverty work, fusing what has previously been a hodge-podge of community and educational services into one comprehensive program that families can enroll in.

“We spend so long doing one-off, silo stuff,” YPI’s Executive Director Dixon Slingerland told LA School Report, “After-school stuff here, job training here, school reform here. No one does it all in a coordinated way. Promise Neighborhoods allow us to pull it all together to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty.”

Promise Neighborhoods takes as its inspiration the Harlem Children’s Zone (featured on This American Life in 2008).

In President Barack Obama’s first term, he secured $75 million in grant money toward replicating the program, more or less, in different cities across the country.

Los Angeles received $30 million, the largest of any city, and YPI will raise at least as much privately.

“We’ve got more than 40 groups that we’re giving sub-grants to, to provide wrap-around services,” said Slingerland. “It’s a new movement about how we look at the work in education.”

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.

U.S. Department of Education Awards Youth Policy Institute $30 Million Promise Neighborhood Grant
The Youth Policy Institute was one of only five agencies in the nation to be awarded President Obama’s prestigious Promise Neighborhood grant today. Digital Journal

Environmental Charter High in Lawndale Nominated for National Blue Ribbon Award
Fourteen public schools in Los Angeles and Orange counties were among 35 across the state nominated for the 2013 National Blue Ribbon Honor, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson announced today. Daily Breeze

Doomsday Prophecy Prompts Rumors of Violence in Schools
The Mayan prediction that the world will end on Friday has caused rumors of violence in schools, including shootings or bomb threats, and a few districts have canceled classes. NYT

Stockton School Shooting Survivor to Newtown: ‘There Is Hope’
Robert Young was in first grade at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton when a troubled drifter opened fire on its crowded playground, killing five children. LA Times

California Near Bottom in Number of School Counselors
As a mourning nation focuses on the need for more mental health support for students, California has regularly ranked at or near the bottom among the states in the number of counselors per student. EdSource

NRA Calls for Armed Guards in Schools to Prevent Killings
The Los Angeles Unified School District, the country’s second-biggest system, has armed police officers at high schools, as well as some middle schools, said spokeswoman Ellen Morgan. Bloomberg

Ed Secretary Duncan Proposes New Accountability Rules on Grant Money
As currently drafted, the rule would give the education secretary authority to demand more information from grantees including project-specific performance measures, baseline data and targets. SI&A Cabinet Report