What’s a community to do when its neighborhood schools are failing, when young families choose private schooling, home schooling or, worse yet, move from the struggling community to better–performing districts to improve their children’s outcomes?

They head to Harlem.

And that’s just what a group of 12 North Columbia leaders, school, and community partners did over the November 13 weekend as part of a select delegation attending the two–day Changing the Odds: Learning from the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) Model Conference.

Over 2,000 city leaders, school officials, service providers, and funders from around the country converged in New York to learn how to emulate Geoffrey Canada’s internationally– lauded model that President Obama has described as “an all–encompassing, all–hands– on–deck anti-poverty effort.”

Conference attendees also heard the latest on the planning money that President Obama included in his proposed FY2010 budget to help 20 neighborhoods across the U.S. replicate this model.

“Cities around the nation are clambering aboard this train…from Detroit to Charleston,” said lawyer and businessman Steve Benjamin, “because it works…like nothing we’ve ever seen before. They have unequivocally changed the odds for a generation of children in Harlem. We must do that for our children here. It’s that simple.”

A cradle–to–college approach, the HCZ chose a cluster of neighboring blocks in Harlem and created a comprehensive, seamless pipeline of services for children ages 0–23 and their families including everything from parenting education to health care, housing, financial and marital counseling, job training, state–of–the–art preschools, rigorous public charter schools, after–school programs, and college admission support and savings funds.

The purpose of the initiative is to prepare every child in that Zone to graduate from college. And it is working. For six consecutive years, 100% of its students who were in the program since preschool have scored at or above grade level. Harvard economist, Roland Fryer, who audited their results, reported that their data, “changed his life as a scientist. They have essentially closed the achievement gap…” he said.

Now, leaders in Eau Claire, an area of North Columbia struggling with decades of economic decline and poor school performance, are hoping the delegates will return with the answers they need to end the cycle of poverty in their neighborhoods once and for all.

“We know the challenges first–hand,” said Dawn Stoner, president of the College Place Community Council, located in the heart of the proposed Promise Zone. “In our neighborhood schools, on our neighborhood streets.”

Frustrated over rampant crime and failing schools, local parents and other concerned neighborhood leaders organized themselves to see what they could do to provide kids with real alternatives to drugs, gangs, crime, and teen pregnancy – the products of a community shackled by intergenerational poverty.

“North Columbia is on the verge of a new era in community involvement. Children are the future of this community; the Promise Zone will be the bridge to that future,” said Henry Hopkins, executive director of the Eau Claire Community Council whose Education Task Force first sparked the idea for the Promise Zone.

Knowing they would have to catch children as early as possible to really have an impact, the Task Force reached out to Richland County First Steps (RCFS) for help. RCFS provided Special Projects coordinator, Sarah Conrad, as a consultant who then plugged the Task Force into the work of the HCZ.

“When I heard Geoffrey Canada speak on National Public Radio about what they were doing in Harlem,” said Conrad, “how they had transformed the lives of so many children and their families, essentially closing the achievement gap by working with children and their parents from the earliest stages of life all the way through college graduation … I knew this is what had to be done in Eau Claire.”

Task Force members took the model back to their neighborhoods and began building support. Out of this initial organizing grew a steering committee and eventually a founding board.

In a twist of fate, the group discovered that Daniel Canada, eldest brother of Geoffrey Canada, HCZ’s founder and CEO, lived in the area. The leaders reached out and found an eager recruit in Canada.

“As a community, we have let our children down. We have asked our teachers, our politicians, even our churches to perform the responsibility that can only be performed by the community,” declared Canada, recently elected chairman of the Board of the Promise Zone. “Our goal in the Eau Claire Promise Zone is to see that the community provides the services needed to nurture our children so they can develop to their full God–given potential.”

Columbia’s delegation left Sunday. Richland County First Steps is coordinating the trip with funding provided by BlueCross BlueShield of S.C., Central Carolina Community Foundation, Sisters of Charity, and several generous donors.

Bud Ferillo whose award–winning documentary Corridor of Shame sheds light on the poor state of education in the state’s rural schools, agreed. “These are many of the same issues that we uncovered in Corridor. If we continue to let our children flounder when there are proven solutions out there, then our state is just digging itself deeper into an economic sinkhole.”

Dr. Ron Prinz, who directs USC’s Parenting and Family Research Center, is a key partner in a national initiative funded by the National Institutes of Health called the “Promise Neighborhood Research Consortium (PNRC). The PNRC, building on 25 years of prevention research, will partner with several neighborhoods throughout the U.S. to promote nurturing environments. “Like millions of Americans, I am pleased with President Obama’s call to improve the development of infants, children, and adolescents,” Prinz said. “The PNRC is excited about the opportunities to collaborate with energetic neighborhoods exemplified by the Eau Claire Promise Zone.”

“Every child, no matter where they are born, no matter into which family, deserves the basic right to live in a healthy and safe environment. They deserve to be loved and stimulated and enriched so that they can fully develop and achieve their potential. It’s to every community’s advantage to focus its attention on the early childhood years because they truly are the most formative time. It’s when the architecture of the brain is created, language and literacy capacity established and social emotional personality and disposition formed. If we concentrate our efforts in the preschool years, these children will succeed in school and in life. They will become contributing members of our society. We need to PROMISE them this opportunity,” said Rick Noble, RCFS CEO.

“The district’s focus right now is literacy. So many of our students are language delayed … by 2–3 years!” reported Ernest Dupree, executive director of Eau Claire Cluster Schools for Richland School District One. “If we can get kids ready when they come to school, then we can teach them. Bottom line.”

“Our kids are not just falling through the cracks, “ said parent and community leader, Catharine Aitken, “It’s more like one giant sinkhole.”

The Eau Claire Promise Zone’s proposed boundaries include the entire catchment areas of Arden and Hyatt Park Elementary Schools, part of John P. Thomas’ (up to I–20), and part of Watkins–Nance’s (around Palmetto–Richland Hospital) zones. The area was drawn to include approximately 3,000 children, the recommended maximum for the program to be successful.