The grant from the Wallace Foundation aims to establish activities for urban youth.

01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, July 15, 2004

BY GINA MACRIS
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Providence will get $1 million a year for each of the next five years to create neighborhood networks that can ensure middle school students get the kind of after-school activities that will keep them safe and happy.

Nancy Devine, director of communities for the Wallace Foundation, yesterday announced the $5-million grant would be given to the new Providence After-School Alliance, an organization headed by Mayor David N. Cicilline.

The $5 million is the first such investment in the nation that the Wallace Foundation has made in trying to create a community safety net of out-of-school activities for vulnerable urban youth.

The Providence After-School Alliance recently received $1 million from Bank of America to help build the neighborhood networks.

Aimed at middle school students who are unsupervised after school, the neighborhood networks are intended to work as dropout prevention efforts.

The neighborhood approach will borrow from the individual contact and interagency cooperation used in community policing, which has contributed to an 11-percent drop in crime in the last six months, Cicilline said yesterday.

City residents should begin to see concrete results from the Wallace Foundation's investment in about a year, according to Hillary Salmons of the Education Partnership, which will house the alliance for several years until it gets off the ground.

At a news conference at McGrane pool next to the West End Recreation Center, Devine said one reason the Wallace Foundation made the award to Providence is that "you listened to the parents and you listened to the kids."

She referred to a year-long research project, also paid for by the Wallace Foundation, which explained the problems from lack of supervision among middle school students.

About half the city's 6,000 middle school students are unsupervised every day after school, according to the study, prepared for Rhode Island Kids Count.

They are most likely to fall behind in their schoolwork, have difficulty behaving, and get involved in drugs or crime, according to studies.

And when they reach high school, these same youngsters are most in danger of dropping out.

But the study commissioned by Kids Count found that parents are reluctant to send their children to after-school programs because of fear of violence.

"Parents reported shootings that occurred on their street or at the local YMCA," said the study, prepared by Market Research Inc. of Northhampton, Mass.

"Students referred to violent encounters and the threat of violence or intimidation from other children," the report said.

The threat of violence is so pervasive that parents reported "actively trying to keep their child from doing anything outside the home after school," forbidding them from playing outside and buying computers and video games so they can entertain themselves indoors.

For youngsters who participate in after-school activities at least once week, the biggest complaint is boredom, according to the study. While some children said they were involved in very interesting activities, others said their programs amounted to a lot of "busy work," the report said.

The cost of after-school activities and transportation problems were cited as barriers to after-school programs, but they took second place to safety and quality.

Devine said there's a "rich menu" of activities at neighborhood centers, libraries, parks and other community organizations,

But the "great challenge" is accessibility; "to pull neighborhoods together to create a coherent system of out-of-school activities," she said.

In an interview, Salmons said that the neighborhood networks must address the concerns expressed by parents and children for safe, interesting, affordable and accessible programs.

The first task will be to involve the neighborhoods in determining what makes a quality program, Salmons said.

She said the Wallace grant will be used primarily for planning and coordinating after-school services, although it might pay for some actual services through pilot programs.

Once neighborhood networks are under way, the Providence After-School Alliance will seek other money to expand the number of programs, Salmons said.

Christine DeVita, the president of the Wallace Foundation, said in an interview earlier this week that Providence got the grant because it has the "political, civic and business leadership who recognize that kids' intellectual, social, and emotional development didn't end at the classroom door."

Because the connection between unsupervised youth and academic failure has been established, DeVita said, the neighborhood network approach is a "really smart way to try to turn around a drop in academic achievement."

Providence is not interested in creating "one or two spectacular out-of-school programs" but in a systematic approach for making interesting activities available, DeVita said.

"It's a very innovative, visionary and gutsy plan," DeVita said. She said the foundation hopes that other cities will learn from it.