NEW YORK — NEW YORK - It's 7:30 a.m., and Altheo Serrao's family has just arrived in Harlem from Staten Island, a two-hour journey by bus, ferry and subway. They do this every school day to be part of a program that isn't available anywhere else in New York City - or, for that matter, anywhere else in the country.
Ezekiel, 8; Isaiah, 6; and Sarah, 5, are enrolled in the Harlem Children's Zone, an ambitious project that has staked out 97 blocks of Central Harlem and seeks to draft every single family into its tight network of health, parenting and educational services that extend from infancy to college.
The Serrao siblings' backpacks bounce as they race each other into the school, where they spend 10 hours a day all year. In Staten Island, they'd be in a troubled public school where, their mother says, "they'd be expected to fail rather than succeed."
Central Harlem remains one of the toughest, poorest parts of New York City, with more than one-third of its residents living in poverty, according to U.S. Census data. The zone takes on the same kinds of seemingly impossible urban problems that Baltimore and so many other cities face: poverty, crime, troubled schools, overwhelmed parents.
What makes it stand apart from other efforts to help at-risk children, say youth advocates who have studied it, is its network of comprehensive classes and programs, and a business strategy similar to that of a Fortune 500 company. Children's Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman has called it the most promising social program for children anywhere in the country.
"Our mission is to transform an entire community by providing everything children need to succeed," says Zone founder and president Geoffrey Canada. "To tackle only one issue while everything else in a child's universe is crumbling is a failed strategy."
The project has received the admiration of presidential candidates and the attention of English royalty. Other cities, including Baltimore, are studying the Zone, with some trying to launch their own version.
"There are huge lessons there that we are looking at as we develop an initiative for East Baltimore," said Robert Blum, director of Johns Hopkins University's Urban Health Institute. Blum and other local community leaders toured Harlem in spring 2007.
Like the children it serves, the Harlem project is growing up. A decade after it began as a one-block pilot program, 7,400 children - about 75 percent of those who live in the Zone - are receiving its services.
