Whatever It Takes
Education Partnership’s Name Is Its Ethos
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FLAGPOLE.COM ∙ JULY 21, 2010
Ryan Lewis
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ow that the Whatever It Takes (WIT) post-secondary education initiative has applied for a Promise Neighborhoods grant from the federal government, the organization behind the application, Athens-Clarke County Family Connection Partnership/Communities in Schools, intends to ignore it. The organization, which combines the local chapters of two statewide organizations that coordinate services to improve the health, academic potential and family support of children, will forget about the $100 million it has asked for—at least for the time being—and continue to seek other sources of funds, according to Dr. Lewis Earnest, president of the partnership. “The grant will not be our focus… We’re forgetting about it until they make their decision,” Earnest says. With or without that federal money, WIT is committed to its “overarching goal,” which, according to its recently launched website (www. witathens.org), is to ensure that “At 1 p.m. on Wednesday, July 1, 2020”—just under 10 years from now—”every child in Athens will be on track to graduate from a post-secondary education.” Partners in the effort to achieving that goal include local schools, universities and health care programs as well as governmental and nonprofit programs that have resources to support at-risk children. Earnest says that outreach workers will recruit children in danger of future academic shortfalls into the program, where they may more easily receive the services of the agencies. The new partnership will focus extensively on providing the foundation for graduation from a four-year university or a vocational, military or technical school. “High school graduation is no longer enough… you need a quality education after high school,” says Earnest. The Promise Neighborhoods grant, the recipients of which will be announced in September, would provide WIT with initial planning funds of $500,000. This would allow for further research into community needs, as well as the hiring of a project manager and facilitators to begin a process of community engagement. With this preparation, WIT would then determine how best to spend the $10.5 million toward early learning programs it would receive annually for the following decade. “We feel like we’re in a good position for that grant, [but] we’re doing it with or without the grant,” says Earnest. Through interagency council meetings and direct appeals by Executive Director Tim Johnson, WIT has already collected partners around Athens. The name “Whatever It Takes” was taken from the title of a book by Paul Tough, an account of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a large-scale social service project that inundates children in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood with educational and health services aimed at turning them into college graduates. Following the Obama Administration’s announcement of the Promise Neighborhood grant in April, the U.S. Department of Education stated that the program would be based in part on the Harlem Children’s Zone model. Even so, Earnest and
Children in the Pauldoe community model their Whatever It Takes gear. Johnson say that WIT is not intended to be a replication of that project. The Children’s Zone, says Earnest, “is kind of a top-down situation.” The program runs its own charter schools, career development and health management programs in Harlem. The resources available and the environment of existing agencies in Athens make a cooperative role more appropriate and sustainable, according to Johnson. Earnest uses the example of a mentor-pairing program, in which WIT would work to ensure that mentors understand cultural differences between themselves and a child, and that the mentoring would last long enough to be effective. WIT’s focus on early learning will involve parents in addition to children, and a proposed lecture series would focus on topics including methods of promoting academic success, according to Johnson. Earnest says that parents who hope for success for their children may be held back by their own backgrounds. “If they didn’t experience positive early development, they don’t know how to provide it for their children,” he says. Another goal of WIT, says Earnest, is the creation of neighborhood expectations that children will go to college and spreading this new expectation in an ever-wider area. He says this follows a foundational belief of the Harlem Children’s Zone: that children follow the norms of their environment, beneficial or destructive. That program offered intensive support to children in a tightly focused area—24 blocks—in 1997. As
the organization established itself more firmly and became influential in the lives of more residents, it spread to 97 blocks by 2007. Destructive norms like drug use or violence, Earnest says, can be replaced by an environment “where it’s cool to be smart.” WIT’s Neighborhood Selection Committee chose an area surrounding Alps Road Elementary and Clarke Middle School as the kickoff point for the pilot project this fall, with other school zones to be added periodically. The zone includes two Athens Housing Authority properties and had 90.2 percent of families in poverty during the 2009–10 school year, according to the school district. However, the zone also includes the Athens-Clarke County Library, St. Mary’s Hospital, Athens Regional Medical Center and Advantage Behavioral Health Systems, all WIT partners. The H.T. Edwards Teaching and Learning Center, also in the zone, offers the school district’s Early Head Start and Head Start programs, which offer child developmental support to families with risk factors like parental drug use or teenage pregnancies. The center now also houses the Classic City Performance Learning Center, a four-year-old alternative high school targeting students who have dropped out of high school, on which Family Connection Partnership/Communities in Schools focuses heavily. “There is great potential to overcome the greatest challenges,” says Sara Bickerton, who works for the Athens-Clarke County Literacy Council and the Jack R. Wells Boys and Girls Club, which is inside the Alps/Clarke Middle school zone. Bickerton has already served on multiple WIT committees. Implementation of data-driven policy will be another benefit of the partnerships, according to Bickerton. Organizations including Clarke County Schools and the UGA Department of Public Administration will all be gathering data, and analysts will be pulled from across the partnership to examine it. “If you don’t see anything improving… make a change,” she says. Kirrena Gallagher, a Family Connection Partnership/ Communities in Schools board member and now the chair of WIT’s Neighborhood Engagement Committee, says that the project’s next challenge is to find people who can develop personal relationships in the communities and gain the trust and support of parents. “We are trying to figure out a way to work around coming in as the saviors. We’re coming in as the partners to help you succeed with your personal goals,” says Gallagher. According to Bickerton, the partnership won’t be discouraged by community skepticism—or even a failure to obtain the federal grant. “We’ve got a lot to prove,” she says. “We have communities that have been living on the edge that have been told time and again that this is going to work, this is going to work… They’ve never been given a reason to believe.” Russell Cox