The Escambia Children’s Trust’s executive director, Tammy Greer, appeared before the school board on Monday and responded to criticism that the ECT only awarded two out-of-school time grants to agencies in north Escambia when the board approved last week $5.1 million for 19 providers.
NorthEscambia.com reported that Greer said, “When you go north of Nine Mile Road, there’s nothing there outside of school for the children. We really want to find the programs that are there that are serving children so that we can make them aware that we exist because we didn’t get applications from them.”
Here is the disconnect. North Escambia doesn’t have as much need as other parts of the county.
According to the gap analysis done by the UWF Haas Center for the Florida Chamber, the five zip codes that cover the central and northern areas of the county only have 1,268 children under the age of 12 living in poverty – about 17% of that age group in those zip codes:
32535 | 159 |
32568 | 45 |
32577 | 103 |
32533 | 285 |
32534 | 676 |
1,268 |
The school grades for those areas reflect that. Four of the five elementary schools are B schools, one is an A school:
Bratt – B
Bryneville – B
Jim Allen – B
Kingsfield – B
Molino – A
Two inner-city zip codes have more than twice as many elementary school children living in poverty – 45% of the kids under 12:
32501 | 792 |
32505 | 2,088 |
2,880 |
Some of the elementary schools serving these neighborhoods are among the lowest performing in the county and state. Lincoln Park is the only B school, three are D’s.
Brentwood – C
C.A. Weis – C
Global Learning – D
Lincoln Park – B
Montclair – D
Oakcrest – D
Spreading Trust dollars around without focusing on the neighborhoods with the most significant needs is a mistake. With the help of the Haas Center, we can drill down even further into the data and identify the exact census tracts with the most poverty and needs.
The Escambia Children’s Trust is trying to put together a puzzle without looking at the picture on the box. The picture on the box is 32505.
Honestly Rick, your reporting on this is the only thing that gives me any hope this venture will ever yield the results it should with 100M+ in taxpayer money at stake.
I threw my hands up in the air watching the last meeting, with the “call your bluff” flavored maneuver on installing Tori Woods as Chair, with Patty Hightower as Vice (again placing the cart before the horse, voting on officers when the stated reason for waiting was allowing a more complete vote of the Board with incoming gubernatorial appointees).
The thing I wonder all the time is the same thing I wondered watching Janice Gilley operate as County Administrator–do they actually think that people don’t see exactly what’s going on? Or do they know it’s evident, and relish the “in front of God and everybody” aspect f it all?
Whatever the case, I hope that Ms. Woods embraces her role as chair, and doesn’t let herself become a pawn in the continued and blatant machinations.
As for puzzles, it’s painful to even glimpse some of the pieces rolling around in a portion of the collective mindset. When anyone, ever, on any subject prefaces a statement with “I want to say this correctly”–signaling there will be a subtext to the forthcoming statement not acceptable for polite company–get ready. Thus I wasn’t shocked to hear Bill Slayton’s doozy on the other end of his rhetorical “correctness”:
“Those parents are readily available to get their students to those activities and events.”
Huh, Bill. What’s the subtext there? “Those” parents in your district are readily available, in distinction to *which* parents and care givers–the ones whose kids and grandkids reside in 32505 and are getting pointedly, at this point even theatrically, getting blown off by the Trust?
And as for the school board continuing to have an inordinate amount of sway over what’s happening on the Children’s Trust, all any sane person needs to do is watch the last school board meeting to assess whether *any* of those five votes should have a large say in administering grant money to disenfranchised children.
I guess you can sit one Board and proudly make bigoted and unconstitutional votes against already marginalized groups of children, then turn around and present yourself as a pillar of understanding and sensitivity about the very cultures you just got done bludgeoning on another.
Nobody’s paying attention to the lunatic cognitive dissonance bouncing around between those interlocking silos, right?