In Baltimore, East Baltimore Development Inc., has formed a partnership that it says is similar to the children's Zone.
"They've thought of everything," says Blum, of Johns Hopkins. "The amount of planning, the leadership of Geoff Canada, those are difficult, if not impossible, things to replicate. It will take many years of planning."
But Blum and EBDI President Jack Shannon, who also toured Harlem, say the Harlem Children's Zone is not without faults. Shannon says the Zone's intense focus on children can overlook problems that their parents face, such as unemployment and housing. Blum says the Zone might also be overly reliant on its leader - something that makes the Zone difficult to replicate and at risk of collapsing without him.
"Geoff is such a fabulous human being and a larger-than-life dynamo," Blum says. Referring to the East Baltimore program he and Shannon are helping to build, "We think it's important to stay away from having a single individual carrying everything."
Canada says it is no accident that he has homed in on children's services. In fact, when he converted Rheedlen to the Harlem Children's Zone, he cast off several adult programs so he could focus on nearly all aspects of a child's life in Harlem.
A partnership with the Children's Health Fund gives free medical and dental care to Promise Academy students. There's an after-school program to address childhood obesity. Kids in "TRUCE Fitness" are required to work out at least two hours a week. Some of the kids in this program, on the fourth floor of an old church, have become involved in karate. Joseph Lopez, 13, unabashedly shares that he lost 20 pounds last year.
Participants in karate and other TRUCE fitness activities collected 145 trophies last year, according to the program's records. One floor down, at the TRUCE program for high-schoolers, teens tape an episode of an award-winning cable show called The Real Deal.
In the show's computer lab one afternoon, Forrest Booker, 16, and his friends edited the sequence of images they had recorded days earlier, trying to finish their segment on unity.
"I work with whatever is given to me," he says of his TRUCE projects, his eyes fixed on the screen. "Usually it comes out beautiful."
Zone employees say they know how important it is to keep kids busy and off the streets. Many of the programs stretch from early-morning hours until well into the evening, as late as 8 or 9 p.m., and run through the summer. The charter schools also have an open-door policy, serving as safe places for kids any time a staff member is present.
The Serrao family always arrives at the Promise Academy an hour before classes begin. Serrao, a petite woman capable of lugging four-book-filled backpacks at once (she is a nursing student at a Harlem community college), volunteers in the mornings, helping teachers prepare for the day.
She says she battles exhaustion, but "these are my kids. It's worth it to give them the best."
julie.bykowicz@baltsun.com
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See videos about the Harlem Children's Zone programs at baltimoresun.com/harlem
