Plan for Youth and Family

By David Pepper

Being a great place to raise a family has always been Cincinnati's greatest srength. But families left our city at a record pace in the 1990's - believing our schools and neighborhoods were not ideal for their kids. This plan addresses key concerns along these lines.

Situation: Cincinnati has long held itself out as a family-friendly city-a great city in which to raise children. Unfortunately, for too many families in our city, this self-image is no longer reality. Today, · too many of our neighborhoods and communities are not built for youth-filled with crime, dangerous locales and litter, and too little for our children to do. Too many families themselves are also failing to give children the parenting and support they need-particularly in the earliest years-to succeed down the road. This summer has shown the tragic consequences when our most vulnerable Cincinnatians grow up in such conditions; · too many of our schools fail to provide our youth with the tools they need to excel, and our community provides too little support to the critical task of educating our children; · and too few of our children are given the other life and work skills they need to participate in our local economy and to help Cincinnati compete with other cities.

These failings carry dire consequences for our city: · we have too many youth far removed from the path to economic opportunity and lacking the tools and values to be self-sufficient, productive citizens in our city; · we are losing thousands of families from our city, and the primary reason they cite is the state of our schools; · our failure to generate and retain more skilled young people is a serious competitive liability. Local businesses are increasingly frustrated by the lack of skilled young employees. As we move to a knowledge-based economy, this problem will only worsen, as businesses will avoid any city that is not producing a capable new economy workforce.

The bottom line is that we can not compete as a city if we are not a strong city for youth and family. On the other hand, if we can claim to be a great city for youth-and a city that is family-friendly once again-we will prosper.

Long-term Goal: To make our city a hub of youth excellence and achievement-even better, to make our city this country's leading city for youth excellence. Certainly, the primary driver of youth success involves family, church, community, and the values they instill, not government. But success also requires a broad community commitment to the goal of youth development and excellence; a city council, board of education and private sector that work together to achieve that goal; and a city council and community that creatively take on aspects of youth development for which the school system is not responsible. It also involves a council and community dedicated to making our neighborhoods youth- and family-friendly, by creating a quality of life in neighborhoods suitable for a healthy childhood.

In the long run, our goal needs to be that we expect young Cincinnatians to excel because we have given them the tools and the environment in which to do so.

The Plan: The Pepper Plan for Youth and Family proposes ten priorities to make this long-term goal a reality. There are three overarching goals: · To create a quality of life conducive to youth excellence; · To create partnerships to better educate our youth; and · To provide the tools and training necessary to propel our youth to be self-sufficient participants and leaders in our city's economy.

Community-wide Partnership and Leadership to Tackle Issues of Youth Development and Education

We have many programs and many people in this city focused on and dedicated to our youth-yet we have too little coordination and cooperation that ensure that we are covering all of our bases and prioritizing in the areas of greatest need. I propose several steps to help solve this problem:

1. Create a Youth Master Plan. Convene a summit of city leaders, including the Mayor, the President of the School Board, the City Manager, the CPS Superintendent, and other community leaders (including youth leaders), to define clear goals regarding our youth, set our priorities to achieve that goal, and spearhead community wide efforts to achieve concrete results. Create an annual Report Card, measuring the status of our youth in the city and benchmarking our progress vis-à-vis other cities and regions.

2. Create a cooperative partnership between City Hall and the Cincinnati Public School system. Nothing is more important to the fate of our city than to have healthy, effective public schools-as Mayor Daley told his fellow Chicagoans, "if we can't get our children educated in this city, nothing else we do really matters." Nevertheless, today there is very little dialogue or cooperation between City Hall and CPS-and there are many examples in recent years where added cooperation would have led to more effective results for each. I propose two steps: a. Hold a regular summit between City Council and the Board of Education to agree upon shared priorities and joint projects. Such shared priorities might include: i. building community-based schools (where city services and other community efforts are brought into the school building, and that building functions as a community center after the school days ends); ii. creating school-based youth advocate programs; iii. recruiting high-quality public school teachers and other CPS employees (through efforts such as homeownership incentives); iv. cooperating in forming private sector-school partnerships; v. working together to identify and provide needed attention to children and teens that are deemed a "high risk" to commit juvenile crime and violence, and; vi. jointly lobbying for public school priorities. b. In conjunction with these efforts, I believe we should organize a Youth Cabinet of City and CPS administrators, principals and teachers, to implement these joint programs and projects.

School Readiness, After-School Programs, and Saving the Dropouts: Doing the Work Schools Don't Do

There are many things the City and community can do which fall outside the jurisdiction of our schools but which can play a key complementary role as our schools prepare our children to be productive members of our community. Because they keep children on the path to economic opportunity, these steps also present our best weapon in preventing juvenile crime and violence. I propose that the city and broader community focus on three long-term priorities:

3. Ensuring that Young Children Are "Ready To Learn." Recent studies of brain development demonstrate how crucial the first several years are in preparing a child for his or her school years. Without proper parenting, a child can get to kindergarten far behind his peers and with little hope of catching up; with no fault of their own, it is these children that are most likely to fall through the cracks as they reach their teenage years. We must work with young, high-risk parents of infants and young children so that they understand proper parenting and are doing what it takes to ensure that their children are school-ready, and we must ensure that early childhood education programs and affordable, high-quality child care services are adequately provided across this city. We must also do all we can to ensure that parents are aware of and are able to access such programs. Intervening at this early age is the best way to inject some hope into what is otherwise a continuing cycle of poverty.

4. Becoming a "Seven to Seven City": Prioritizing after-school activities. Our public schools get out as early as 1:45 p.m., yet most parents work beyond 5 p.m. at least. With school-organized after-school activities on the decline, too many of our children are unsupervised from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m., filling those hours with either wasted time-or perhaps troublemaking time. In fact, studies show that those hours are the "Prime Time for Juvenile Crime," where children are more likely to be both the perpetrators and victims of crime. We must aggressively work as a community (private and public) to inject a menu of productive activities into the afternoon for children-youth development programs, arts, sports and recreation programs, faith-based programs, values-based teaching, etc. Our goal must be to be a "Seven to Seven" City-meaning that we provide supervised youth activities from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

5. Making sure dropping out is not the end of the line. Through the use of community-based GED programs and focused job training, we must be a community that plucks as many teenagers as possible out of the "dead end" route created by dropping out of school.

Building a Better Environment for Youth

6. We must make our neighborhoods far more youth-friendly than they are today-safer, devoid of crime, with activities that encourage development as opposed to danger: a. Use the community-based school concept to keep school buildings open after the school day ends, allowing these assets to serve as community centers and safe havens for children in the after-school hours. We should also use technology to identify those neighborhoods that are most in need of local after-school activities. In addition, we must ensure that neighborhood families are aware of the various local after-school activities available for their children. b. Identify and proactively attack the greatest sources of physical danger and ill-health for children in neighborhoods-abandoned buildings, abandoned cars, and litter. c. Provide a clear-cut "youth strategy," and a person accountable for how a department's activity impacts on youth, in each of the city's departments. d. Continue to build upon and invest in this city's strongest assets for kids-primarily its park and recreation systems-to provide added opportunity for youth development; e. Work with neighborhood police and community anti-crime leaders to emphasize crime and youth gang awareness and prevention in neighborhoods. f. Encourage community groups and neighbors to create Kid Safe Zones, where families get to know and look out for other neighbors' children (coordinating schedules, etc.), identify and remove child hazards from streets and parks, work with police on juvenile crime prevention, etc.

7. Work with the broader community, including the private sector and organized labor, to promote economic opportunity and early job skills for our children a. Learn and build upon this summer's private-public youth jobs program so that our children are able to leverage the education we give them with true work skills, training and experience; b. Build upon public-private partnerships to ensure all Cincinnati children are exposed to technology at an early age; c. Incorporate a youth component into local and regional job training initiatives.

8. Encourage active volunteerism with our youth. It truly does take a village to raise a community of strong, healthy, educated children. Through example and words, city leaders should trumpet and encourage as much community involvement with youth as possible: adopt-a-school programs; mentoring and child literacy programs; principal-for-a-day events by local celebrities and leaders; etc. Consider creative

9. Addressing Youth Crime a. Prevention: the best way to prevent juvenile crime (and juvenile victimization from crime) is to use community-based schools and after-school programs to keep kids off the street at the "Prime Time for Juvenile Crime" (3 - 6 p.m.). b. Targeting high-risk teens. Working with schools, police, probation officers, and other agencies, the city should identify the city youth most likely to commit crimes and enlist a variety of services to keep them from crossing the line into criminal behavior. c. Expand and energize youth-oriented police programs, building a healthy relationship between our police and youngsters; d. For non-violent youth offenders, work with community groups to punish wrongdoers through community service activities; and e. Heighten attention on gang activities in the City, raising awareness of tell-tale signs of gang activity and helping parents and teachers understand how to keep their kids away from this growing problem.

10. Celebrate and Reward Youth Excellence. Too often, we simply lament our troubled youth. We should instead communicate to our youth that-with the tools our community has to offer them, along with their own hard work and determination-we expect them to succeed, and we should reward them when they do. Working with schools, private partners and the media, the City should celebrate its most talented youth through Cincinnati Youth Excellence Awards, given for different age levels and for varying forms of excellence (academic, arts, community service, etc.). We should hold them up as role models of success. At a more micro-level, we should work with private sector partners to reward high-achieving youth with privately supported summer internship, employment and enrichment opportunities.