Jacksonville program to launch parenting school in November

[Patricia M. McBride]

Does Jacksonville really have that many parents who don't know how to parent? And the program is being targeted for one area of town or group of people? From what I read here, it is a sit around and discuss things forum; how do they get the folks they think need this to come?

Jacksonville program to launch parenting school in November

The New Town Success Zone program hopes to educate families in North Jacksonville.

Posted: October 4, 2010 - 12:00am

By Topher Sanders

A new parenting program is coming to Jacksonville with the aim of strengthening the relationships between babies and their parents to help children's early development.

The New Town Success Zone's Jacksonville Children's University will start in early November with 10 to 15 families at the Schell-Sweet Family Resource Center. The New Town program is modeled after the Harlem Children's Zone and aims to improve the health and education of children in a swath of northwest Jacksonville.

The Jacksonville Children's University is inspired by the Harlem program's Baby College, which has received national attention for its parenting training.

"We're trying to replicate that in Jacksonville," said Mary Nash, a team leader with the Jacksonville Children's Commission's early learning department. Nash helped to create the curriculum for the program, which will be run by Shands Jacksonville.

Relationships are at the center of strong parenting and strong child development, Nash said.

"It's still all around that relationships are the most important thing in a child's life," Nash said. "Whether they're learning to move, talk, walk, everything they're learning is in response to a relationship with an adult."

Empowering parents

The program will focus on health, safety, discipline, reading, playing and teaching parents about the stages of child and brain development. The techniques are not automatically known to parents, said Claudette Christopher, the program's lead facilitator.

"Nobody teaches about brain development and how important those learning experiences are for development and even how trust and attachment promotes brain development," Christopher said. "They're going to learn those types of things in the program."

The university will serve pregnant mothers and families with children up to age 3. The families will attend the university once a week, for six weeks, in two-hour blocks.

The plan is to serve five groups of parents in the pilot year.

The Community Foundation and The Northeast Florida Healthy Start Coalition are splitting the pilot program's $43,000 cost. Parents will receive a $100 Visa gift card for attending all six classes.

"It's exciting to be part of this," said Carol Brady, executive director of the Northeast Florida Healthy Start Coalition. The program will empower its participants, she said, by allowing them to drive the discussion, with facilitators there to guide them.

"Parents don't like to sit around and have someone preach at them," Brady said, "the parents do the discussion, the facilitator is truly just a facilitator."

Using what they learn

The program will also collect data on parents and receive help from the University of Florida on evaluating its effectiveness. The evaluators will be checking how much participants learn during the program. Three months after parents complete their classes, evaluators will check to see if they continued the techniques taught in the university.

Nash said she hopes the program helps parents rear "happy kids that are ready to learn."

"The ultimate goal," she said, "is to have children who do well in school, go onto higher education and become active citizens in the community."

topher.sanders@jacksonville. com, [phone]

link: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2010-10-04/story/jacksonville-pr...

[Patricia M. McBride]

The organization that our city is modeling after (see below) is a not for profit which is run on donations; not tax dollars. It has, most recently, received a 20M dollar donation from Goldman Sachs and has been written up in the New York Times. The CEO has been interviewed on national TV and has been written up in the NY Times numerous times. Far different from the program which will be run here in Jacksonville at tax payer expense (and this program grows and grows to encompass more and more children of other ages and becomes far more costly than the current 20M price tag for this commission). This might have been better handled as a not for profit on donations in the private sector rather than as a program run by our city at tax payer expense.

The HCZ Project
100 Blocks, One Bright Future

Called "one of the most ambitious social-service experiments of our time," by The New York Times, the Harlem Children's Zone Project is a unique, holistic approach to rebuilding a community so that its children can stay on track through college and go on to the job market.

The goal is to create a "tipping point" in the neighborhood so that children are surrounded by an enriching environment of college-oriented peers and supportive adults, a counterweight to "the street" and a toxic popular culture that glorifies misogyny and anti-social behavior.

In January 2007, the HCZ Project launched its Phase 3, expanding its comprehensive system of programs to nearly 100 blocks of Central Harlem. President Barack Obama has called for the creation of "Promise Neighborhoods" across the country based on the comprehensive, data-driven approach of the HCZ Project.

The HCZ pipeline begins with The Baby College, a series of workshops for parents of children ages 0-3. The pipeline goes on to include best-practice programs for children of every age through college. The network includes in-school, after-school, social-service, health and community-building programs. The pipeline has, in fact, dual pathways: on one track, the children go through our Promise Academy charter schools; while on the other track, we work to support the public schools in the Zone, both during the school day with in-class assistants and with afterschool programs.

For children to do well, their families have to do well. And for families to do well, their community must do well. That is why HCZ works to strengthen families as well as empowering them to have a positive impact on their children's development.

HCZ also works to reweave the social fabric of Harlem, which has been torn apart by crime, drugs and decades of poverty.

The two fundamental principles of The Zone Project are to help kids in a sustained way, starting as early in their lives as possible, and to create a critical mass of adults around them who understand what it takes to help children succeed.

The HCZ Project began as a one-block pilot in the 1990s, then following a 10-year business plan, it expanded to 24 blocks, then 60 blocks, then ultimately 97 blocks.

The budget for the HCZ Project for fiscal year 2010 is over $48 million, costing an average of $5,000 per child.

Like all HCZ programs, those of the HCZ Project are provided to children and families absolutely free of charge, which is made possible by the support of people like you.