Sacramento Focuses on Grade-Level Reading

I see that State of the ReUnion has been doing some reporting on Sacramento, California, exploring some of the tough challenges facing the community, so I thought I’d mention that Sacramento is joining the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, a national effort to get more low income kids to read at grade level by third grade.

Last month, Mayor Kevin Johnson launched the Sacramento Reads! 3rd Grade Literacy Campaign, one of the largest communitywide reading initiatives in the United States. Currently only about 37 percent of third graders in Sacramento read at grade level. The goal of Sacramento Reads! is for 80 percent of third graders to be reading at grade level by 2020.

Sacramento’s ambitious plan is part of a collaborative effort by dozens of funders and nonprofit partners across the nation known as the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading. Other communities that have answered the call include New Britain, Connecticut; Springfield, Massachusetts and Los Angeles, California.

The campaign focuses on three preventable causes of the performance gap between low income readers and other students:
•    The readiness gap: The fact that many low income kids who show up for school are already behind because they haven’t had as much access to books or high quality pre-kindergarten programs that help prepare students to learn.
•    The attendance gap: I’ve already written a blog post about this problem. Research has found that one in 10 kindergarten and first grade students nationwide misses nearly a month of school each year in excused and unexcused absences.
•    The summer slide (summer learning loss): Lots of students lose ground over the summer if they are not reading at home or engaged in enrichment programs.

The National Civic League has also joined this nationwide effort. Our part will be to encourage communities to address the reading gap by focusing the 2012 and 2015 All-America City Awards on grade level reading efforts. Ordinarily, the award programs let communities choose the issue areas they want to present to our jury of civic experts at the annual event. In 2012, we’ll be doing things a little differently.

In 2012, the All-America City Award program will be a little different. NCL is asking communities to develop comprehensive plans that focus on the three critical areas identified by the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading. Winners must demonstrate capacity to use data, deploy effective interventions, build strong cross‐sector partnerships, and mobilize public will to improve reading proficiency in the early grades.

Since the late 1990s, NCL has asked All-America City finalist communities to list at least one project that benefitted or engaged young people. Consequently, we’ve had more than a few past winners present reading or literacy projects.

For example: Marietta, Georgia, a winner in 2006, touted “Marietta Reads!” program. Participants selected books from approved lists and are tested on reading comprehension. Students earned points on the basis of the book’s difficulty and test scores. Goals were set for students at each grade level in all the city’s schools, and students earned awards by reaching those goals.

Hollywood, Florida, a winner in 2007, presented its “Born to Read” program, which positioned a fulltime librarian at the Memorial Primary Care Clinic, to interact with each family of young children. New families were given an application for a library card, a resource guide and a first book for the child. Families were given instructions on ways to encourage reading and this is reinforced with every subsequent visit to the clinic.

El Paso, Texas, a winner in 2010 has its annual Día de los Niños/ Día de Los Libros to improve literacy and health awareness in the community. The event involves a free giveaway of books and opportunities for young people to sign up for the Summer Reading Club.

Tupelo, Mississippi, a winner last year, featured two projects from the mayor’s task force on education:  “Read Tupelo” which provides a morning of learning for approximately 400 four and five year olds, including art activities, a music demonstration with various instruments, and story time presented by local officials and volunteers. Another initiative provides every baby born at North Mississippi Medical Center’s Women’s Hospital a copy of the book, Goodnight Moon.

Our hope is that more and more communities will do what Sacramento is doing and organize community-based efforts to address the reading gap. (Another difference in 2012 is that the campaign and its partners are offering technical assistance and peer learning opportunities to cities that participate in the award process.) To qualify, communities must submit a letter of intent by October 14.

For more information on the All-America City Grade Level Reading Award, visit the campaign’s website or the All-America City Award blog.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

In 1947 burglars broke into the Jackson County, Missouri Courthouse, blasted open a vault with nitroglycerine and made off with local election records. The crime was never solved, but everyone knew the purpose: to prevent the government from investigating allegations of widespread fraud in the 1946 Democratic Party primary.

It wasn’t obvious at the time, but the unsolved break-in (shades of Watergate) marked the dying gasp of a notoriously corrupt regime, a machine that had dominated Kansas City, Missouri, for decades. After that and some other outrages, a citizen committee formed to prevent the remnants of the machine from regaining a foothold in local affairs.

Kansas City won its first All-America City Award in 1950 for “forming a citizens committee to keep the rascals out.” They’ve won the award four more times since, making them one of a select group of five-time AAC winners.

Over the years, the focus of AAC, or rather the projects listed by the communities, has evolved along with mission of the National Civic League and the nature of the challenges facing American communities. During the 1950s, a central theme was fighting corruption and professionalizing city government. In the 1960s and 1970s there was more on race relations and redeveloping deteriorating urban areas. In the 1980s, the focus shifted to crime and youth gangs, the loss of manufacturing jobs and dealing with the consequences of rapid growth, and so on.

The idea of the award is that by recognizing and publicizing outstanding examples of civic accomplishment we could influence other communities to undertake similar efforts. We’re pretty proud of the way the program has worked in the past, but in recent years, we’ve begun to think about how we could use the award more strategically, not just to recognize things that have already happened, but to try to get communities to focus on particular challenges going forward.

In small ways, we’ve been doing this for years. A recent example: in 2010, Scott County, Kansas, was selected as a finalist for the award competition. The community sent a delegation of local worthies to plead their case in front of a jury of civic experts. The delegation came very close to winning, but fell short, partly because, as one of the jurors put it—where’s the diversity?

Like many other areas of the country, western Kansas had experienced rapid growth in its Latino population as more and more immigrants moved to join the local work force. But this growing diversity was not very well-reflected in their application or in the composition of their delegation.  “We took that to heart,” notes Katie Eisenhour, executive director of the Scott City Chamber of Commerce. “NCL called us on it. That’s when we really looked at our community and had the courage to have these conversations about our Hispanic community.”

That year, Southwest Airlines offered to pay for any finalist community that wanted to avail itself of NCL’s Community Success program, which helps convene community-based dialogues and civic engagement process. Scott City held its first Diversity/Multicultural Roundtable in November 2010. A Diversity Steering Committee has been meeting on a monthly basis. (Read more about the effort here.)

The committee has been hosting local events to bring together Latinos, Mennonites and other groups within the community. They developed a list of priorities, including after hours English-as-a second language classes, a resource center for newcomers, hiring bilingual employees in local businesses, encouraging a more diverse representation in local government and holding an annual multi-cultural event that would hopefully become a community tradition.

In 2011 they came back to the All-America City Award (this time as Scott City), making diversity and cultural understanding a central part of their presentation. The jurors were impressed enough to make them one of the ten winners selected last June, fittingly enough, in Kansas City.

We do this award for a reason. Sure, it’s a great event and its gives people a chance to network, exchange ideas and receive the recognition they deserve, but we also want to have a tangible influence on what’s going on in communities, which is one reason we decided to focus the 2012 award program one critical issue, K-3 reading proficiency and see if in partnership with a national coalition we could help move the dime on a critical issue.

It’s an experiment, and next year we will find out how well it works. In the meantime, you can read more about the 2012 AAC Grade Level Reading Award by linking here.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

A Long Island Village Takes a Stand Against Hate Crimes

Last year I attended the National League of Cities conference here in Denver, where I watched an outstanding documentary called, “Welcome to Shelbyville.” It was about a small city in Tennessee that was coming to grips with a growing Somali population and how immigration was changing the community.

The film could easily have been made about Colorado towns such as Greeley or Fort Morgan, where many East Africans have arrived to take jobs in the local meat processing plants. In fact, throughout the South, the West and the Midwest, these new “gateway” communities are experiencing the challenges and opportunities associated with immigration that only large urban centers experienced in the past.

My organization, the National Civic League, was involved in a statewide project funded by the Colorado Trust to do community dialogues focused on immigrant integration in 2007 and 2008. Immigration was a hot topic in Colorado and nationally during that period, but it was an issue that cut in unexpected ways, dividing conservative against conservative and posing perplexing challenges to liberals as well.

The Bush Administration, for instance, tried and failed to pass a comprehensive immigration bill during its second term, but Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a non-comprehensive (and one-sided) immigration bill focused strictly on enforcement that alliented Latino voters.

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Since the onslaught of the Great Recession, other debates seem to have eclipsed immigration as hot button issues

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In 2007, Robert Putnam, a liberal political scientist at Harvard, published “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century,” which found that ethic diversity was associated with lower levels of social trust. Putnam wasn’t arguing against immigration, quite the contrary. He was exploring the complexity of the issue, and the challenges for democratic institutions in which levels of social trust are a key to success.

On September 21, PBS stations will air a new documentary called “Not in Our Town: Light in the Darkness.” The documentary explores how a town in Long Island, New York, came to grips with a series of hate crimes that culminated in the murder of Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero by a group of local teenagers. The documentary tracks efforts by local leaders to change the local atmosphere of fear and hate that led to the murder.

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Patchogue Village Mayor Paul Pontieri held a series of meetings with Latino residents to understand the nature of the problem. New leaders emerged, including the victim’s brother, Joselo Lucero, who became a champion for justice and unity, and a local librarian-assistant named Gilda Ramos who had tried to warn people about the attacks. Thousands gathered at the local train station near the site of the attack for a candle light vigil in the rain.

The Suffolk County Police Department assigned Spanish-speaking officers to the village. The Patchogue-Medford Library began to serve as a link for the local immigrant population, providing a safe venue where people could meeting and discuss the issues. The schools got involved as well.

The film will be the center piece of a “Not in Our Town National Week of Action” from September 18-24. Public media outlets and other groups will hold screenings, events and discussions on hate crime prevention and ways to make communities safer.

Since the onslaught of the Great Recession, other debates seem to have eclipsed immigration as hot button issues—namely jobs, deficit and debt, which isn’t surprising in a way. In a faltering economy there are fewer jobs and immigration tends to slacken, but the recent horror in Norway, where an anti-immigrant fanatic attacked kids at a Labor Party youth camp, was a reminder that communities and countries ignore the issue of immigrant integration at their own peril.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

My father was a broadcast/film professor at SMU. Radio was his first love, but he relished any and all forms of media—TV news, old movies, theater. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Living Theater, the New Deal-era program that paid starving actors, playwrights and directors to stage live drama about current events.
I know that if he were alive today, he would have loved digital media and the almost infinite potential of broadband Internet. I also know he would have been a big fan of BTOP (Broadband Technology Opportunities Program), which is part of the federal economic stimulus package adopted in 2009.

In Southern California, the Tribal Digital Village is working with ZeroDivide, the San Francisco-based technology foundation, and using BTOP funding to promote awareness and adoption of broadband in the tribal areas of San Diego County. Baseline broadband adoption on these reservations is only 17 percent, as compared to about 66 percent of communities nationwide. In most cases this is due to a simple lack of availability.
Matthew Rantanen is director of technology for TDV, a nonprofit founded by the Southern California Tribal Chairman’s Association. He says that for many who live in the tribal areas past experience with the Internet, if any, was an AOL dial-up account. “We are out there telling people what broadband actually is, and ways you can make changes in their lives,” says Rantanen. “Many people don’t even understand the opportunities.”
TDV, which is both a provider and an evangelist for broadband, is taking a “slow rollout” approach, moving from reservation to reservation in an effort to sign up more residents for its wireless broadband service, which consists of a solar power microwave tower that sits atop a hill. The group can offer “line of sight” service to homes on and near the reservation. In other words, if you can see the home from the hill, TDV can provide the service.
Currently, TDV is providing broadband service to about 270 homes. Eventually they hope to hit about 2,000 homes, but before they can do that, they need more funding to upgrade the system and partially subsidize the cost of installation and equipment.
So what are the people learning? “We give them give an overview of the Internet, something on online banking, applying for college or jobs, job training, how to use maps, find directions and how to buy airplane tickets,” says Rantanen. “Then we go through the whole social aspect, the My Space, Twitter all that. We jump into personal website building and promoting business, promoting a craft and online sales of the craft. We show how its can be a resource for medical care and e-health for things like DMV, managing your personal assets, investing, email, Apple’s iChat and Skype.”
“Half the people that show up are parents or grandparents of children who have Internet at school, but when they come home, they have nothing,” says Rantanen. So they’re telling their parents or grandparents, `Look, we’ve got to have Internet, because I need it for my school work.’”
BTOP strikes me as having echoes of the New Deal rural electrification program, an effort that transformed the lives and economic fortunes of millions of American in rural areas of the country.

Rantanen for one is a firm believer in the transformational power of broadband, especially when it comes to education and jobs. “The unemployment rate on tribes is typically hovering around 50 percent,” he says. “With broadband they can look on craigslist and find jobs in their area. They can go online for training, build resumes and apply online.”

“Even if you walk into Home Depot to apply in person,” he adds, “they put you at a computer and you fill out the application on a terminal. There’s a huge shift in the way things are working and being out in a rural community and not having access to broadband really restricts your ability to move in today’s market.”

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

I have a fondness for old business routes, motel rows, kitschy gift shops, Western-themed diners and gas stations that sell Jackalope post cards.

Lakewood, Colorado’s section of Route 40 (also known as West Colfax) was once known as “Gateway to the Rockies.” If you were a traveler in the 1950s and you were looking for a tourist motel, an authentic Russian steam bath or a prefabricated diner built in New Jersey and shipped out West by rail, Route 40 was your bet.

Route 40’s heyday ended with the completion of the federal Interstate Highway System, one of the most expensive and consequential public works programs in the history of the world. Business districts dried up overnight, along with many a Main Street, USA. It’s what used to be called progress.

Today the prefabricated diner is now a historic landmark. There are still motels on West Colfax, but some of them have gone to seed. Service stations have been turned into used car lots or vacant buildings where sumac plants grow in the cracks of sidewalks.

I was driving Route 40 recently, stopping along the way to take pictures of old motel signs. West Colfax is about to be transformed again by transportation. In this case it is the Denver RTD Light Rail system, which is slated to sprout a westward line, connecting downtown Denver to Golden, Colorado, following partway the path of fabled Route 40.

When the light rail expansion initiative passed, Lakewood began to plan for the future, with an ambitious list of projects to coincide with light rail expansion. The goal was to encourage “transit-oriented, mixed use development” around the soon to be built light rail stations, four in all. This would include medium density housing, shops and office buildings.

Planning development around rail systems makes a lot of sense. It prevents sprawl and infrastructure inefficiencies. It encourages transit use and pedestrian activity and “eyes on the street,” which makes neighborhoods safer, more civically alive and, frankly more fun.

The city plans to locate a Head Start facility near one of the stations so parents can drop off kids on their way to the work commute. A company that specializes in developing polluted building sites will be building its new headquarters on a “brownfield” on the corridor.

Fittingly, the city plans to locate a historic transit museum at one of the stations, sporting a restored, 100-year-old interurban rail car, which once ran along the West Colfax route, before the interurban rail system were dismantled throughout the west. (Interurban rail systems in the Western U.S. were another victim of the interstate highway system.)

I live near a mixed use, commercial-residential district built around a light rail stop in nearby Denver, and I am a firm believer. There is something liberating about being able to talk to a light rail station and not having to park, maybe not as liberating as driving a 59 Ford on old Route 40, but an environmentally responsible close second.

Lakewood’s Light Rail Corridor planning project was one of the three community betterment efforts Lakewood touted when it won an All-America City Award last month. The other projects were an effort to “green” old office buildings (make them more energy efficient) and a successful effort to save an old middle school from being closed by building a new Boys and Girls Club on site. Link here to see a steam of their presentation of the three projects.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

Last week I was in Kansas City doing social/new media work for the All-America City Awards, the 62-year-old civic recognition program of 117-year-old National Civic League. About 700 people from all over the country showed up in Kansas City for the annual confab.

A youth contingent from Dedham, Massachusetts, drove all the way from New England in the van, stopping off along the way to do community service. Dedham was not named one of the 2011 All-America Cities, but their youth delegation really exemplified the spirit of community and civic responsibility at the heart of the award.

It was a tough decision for the jury of civic experts that chose the ten winners. They were in deliberation for several hours, but eventually they narrowed down the 23 finalists to a list of ten. Not being on the jury or being privy to their deliberations, I have no influence over the selection, but over the course of the three-day event I tend to develop personal favorites. Dedham was one of them, and so was Fort Worth, Texas, which did end up on the list of ten winners.

Why Fort Worth? Frankly, I’ve always had a certain fascination for the place, so different and yet so close to Dallas, where I was raised. The Dallas of my youth was a glitzy shopping center of a town of leafy estates, gleaming high rises, exclusive country clubs and famous department stories like Neiman Marcus. Fort Worth was a rail yard town, a grittier, funkier, working class place. Dallas was the Cotton Mart. Forth Worth was Panther Hall and Cowtown Jamboree.

This duality was always a simplistic way of looking at things, and much has changed since those days. Fort Worth today is known for its high tech industries and excellent art museums. It is one of the fastest growing major cities in the country. To judge from its All-America City projects, it is also a city with a beating heart.

And this gets to the other reason I was secretly rooting for Fort Worth was that two of its three All-America City projects were focused on—how shall we put this?—“underserved communities.” For instance, the city has taken a “no wrong door” approach to mental health services, meaning that all the public, private and nonprofit service agencies work together to ensure that people who have mental health needs don’t fall in between the cracks.

Forth Worth has also adopted a similarly comprehensive approach to the homeless problem with “Directions Home,” a successful ten year plan to address the problem of chronic homelessness. The initiative was started by Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief, a former state senator who is about to end his eight-year tenure as mayor.

Some mayors like to point to a new sports arena or business park as their legacy. Moncrief has Directions Home.  The scion of a famous Texas oil family, Moncrief remembers a visit to skid row Los Angeles and gazing out upon a “sea” of homeless people. It was one of the most emotional moments I’ve had in my 40 years of public service,” recalls the mayor, “seeing that sea of homelessness—of hopelessness.”

Forth Worth, by contrast had a homeless population of 4000. “We could get a rope around that,” said the mayor. Borrowing from the best ideas they encountered on a tour of homeless programs across the country, the task force learned three things, the mayor told me. “Just giving people a house without services doesn’t work,” says Mayor Moncrief. “Providing services without housing doesn’t work, either. Finally, the most important lesson of all, doing nothing doesn’t work.”

The emphasis of the program has been to provide housing with services wrapped around it—social services, law enforcement, health care and employment services. Project WISH, for example, a collaboration of nonprofits, local government, homeless shelters and employers, has trained and placed 650 people into viable jobs at above minimum wages.

Directions Home does seems to be working, as attested by the fact that the chronic homelessness in Fort Worth has been reduced by about 20 percent during the past couple of years, a period of sever economic hardship nationwide.

The ten All-America City Award winners are Kenai, Alaska; Dublin, California; Lakewood, Colorado; Belleville, Illinois; South Bend, Indiana; Scott City, Kansas; Tupelo, Mississippi; Fayetteville, North Carolina; Eden, North Carolina and Fort Worth, Texas

You can read about these community and their civic engagement efforts—and watch some video—on our blog.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.