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Local group bids for cradle-to-career funds

A local nonprofit, the Clarke County School District and a dozen other local agencies are seeking millions of dollars from the federal government to turn around an entire Clarke County neighborhood and push at least 65 percent of its kids to graduate, earn a college degree and get a job.

The group is putting the final touches on an application for the extremely competitive Promise Neighborhoods grant, announced by the Obama administration in April. The paperwork is due Friday.

The grant is based on the successful Harlem Children's Zone, a program that was piloted in the early 1990s to bring support services for a range of problems poor people were facing on a single city block - crumbling apartments, failing schools, violent crime and chronic health problems.

The program monitors the development of families and helps them navigate every barrier to create "a safety net woven so tightly that children in the neighborhood just can't slip through," as the New York Times Magazine called it.

In the Harlem Children's Zone, children from birth to 23 years old in a certain geographic area are saturated in a "success-oriented" environment, according to the organization. Similarly, the Promise Neighborhoods program seeks to build a "continuum of academic programs and family and community supports, from the cradle through college to career."

Today, the Harlem program encompasses more than 100 blocks and serves more than 8,000 children and 6,000 adults. This year, 197 students from the Harlem Children's Zone were accepted into college for the fall semester, representing 90 percent of the school's high school seniors, according to the group.

To replicate the success of the Harlem Children's Zone, the U.S. Department of Education will award 20 communities in September with up to $500,000 in planning money.

If Clarke County wins an implementation grant, it will receive $10 million for the next nine years and start with the children who live in the attendance zone for Alps Road Elementary School, according to Tim Johnson, director of Family Connection/Communities in Schools of Athens, the agency spearheading the grant application.

"It would be an enormous boost," Johnson said. "As far as I know, that would be the single biggest grant specifically for children Athens has ever re

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