Welcome to the September issue of Provplan's e-newsletter. We are now e-mailing this to more than 1,500 people a month and we appreciate the positive feedback we have received thus far. We have two big stories to share with you – Ready to Learn receiving $7 million in federal grant money to improve early care in Providence and Dick Spies being appointed as our new chairman by the mayor and governor. These are exciting times for us and we look forward to being a resource in the ongoing economic and social revitalization of the city of Providence.

Thanks,
Pat McGuigan, Executive Director
pmcguigan@provplan.org

U.S. Secretary of Education brings nearly $7 million to R2LP 
Ready to Learn Providence, a program of The Providence Plan, learned in late August it had won two highly competitive federal grants totaling nearly $7 million. In recognition of this extraordinary achievement, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings came to R2LP in person to deliver the checks.

“I’m always interested in programs that can be great models around the country,” Secretary Spellings told the many staff, community members and political officials filling the R2LP offices on August 31. “The eyes of the nation are on you.”

The two grants will allow R2LP to continue its work in early literacy. An Early Reading First (ERF) grant, the second awarded to R2LP, will be used to create additional centers of educational excellence. An Early Childhood Education Professional Development Project grant, one of only three awarded in the country, will give R2LP funds to enhance its professional development programs.

“The Professional Development grant was probably the most competitive grant we could have applied for,” noted Joyce Butler, director of R2LP. The only other recipients of this grant are two large universities – Johns Hopkins and the University of Massachusetts. [more on R2LP...]

ProvPlan and Department of Education track student mobility throughout the state
With the adoption of new statewide student identifiers in 2004, The Providence Plan has been able to track student mobility throughout the entire state. ProvPlan, hired by the R.I. Department of Education to analyze the data, examined the scale of student movement within and among school districts, and also tracked student mobility to and from specific districts. Accompanying maps illustrate the movement graphically.

Using data from the fall of 2004 and the fall of 2005, ProvPlan’s Eben Dowell determined how many students moved during the school year, both statewide and by district. Central Falls, with 42 percent of its Fall 2004 students enrolled in another district in Fall 2005, saw the highest mobility. Thirty percent of the students in Providence changed districts, placing the city fifth on the list of all districts.

[more on Mobility...]

Inclusionary zoning program would add to city’s affordable housing stock
Responding to demands from residents and advocates in Providence’s West End, Elmwood and South Providence neighborhoods, Making Connections Providence teamed up with advocates, agencies, city officials and PolicyLink (a think tank based in Oakland, California) to develop a set of recommendations that would create a citywide ordinance requiring that a percentage of housing units in new residential developments be available to low and moderate income households.

The program, known as inclusionary zoning, has been adopted successfully in other U.S. cities where, like Providence, the cost of buying or renting a housing unit has skyrocketed. In some Providence neighborhoods – Olneyville, for example – housing costs have escalated by as much as 340 percent in the past five years, far outpacing income growth.

Making Connections Providence (MCP), with grant support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, hired PolicyLink, a national organization with expertise in this field, to develop specific recommendations for Providence. PolicyLink’s recommendations would require developers to set aside a percentage of units in new developments for households making 60 to 120 percent of the area median income, with two tiers of affordability. The percentage of affordable units would vary depending on the size and nature of the development or rehabilitation project, but the recommended ordinance would apply to all housing developments, regardless of whether the units are rented or owned.

In exchange for contributing to the affordable housing stock, developers will receive compensation in the form of density bonuses (allowing them to build more units on a particular site) and zoning variances. A study of California inclusionary housing programs in 28 cities found that not a single program had a negative effect on housing production. Indeed, most jurisdictions with inclusionary programs saw an increase in housing production, according to PolicyLink.

The study’s recommendations are currently under review by city officials. [more on IZ...]

ProvPlan welcomes Dick Spies as its new chair
In July, Richard R. Spies was named chair of The Providence Plan’s Board of Directors. Dick, who has been a member of the board for more than four years, succeeds Thomas J. Anton, who died in early June after a long battle with cancer.

Dick brings a wealth of experience in strategic planning, goal setting, communications, finance and development to his work with The Providence Plan. Since 2002 he has served as the executive vice president for planning and senior advisor to the president at Brown University. As a key member in the Office of the President, Dick assists President Ruth Simmons in developing and implementing Brown’s ambitious Plan for Academic Enrichment.

A graduate of Amherst College (B.A. mathematics), Dick earned his doctorate in economics at Princeton University in 1972. With his appointment as assistant to the provost in 1971, he began three decades of service at Princeton, advancing to vice president for finance and administration, a post he held from 1988 through 2001.

"I am really excited to have this opportunity to help The Providence Plan help the community,” Dick says. “This is an important time in the development of Providence as a city and as a community, and I am delighted to be able to play some small role in that development. I look forward to working with Pat McGuigan and the other terrific staff at TPP, as well as with the board and our many partners and supporters, to make Providence a better place for all of us."

In addition to his work with The Providence Plan, Dick serves as a director of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council; a member of the board and the executive committee of The Providence Foundation; and a board member of the Tuition Plan Consortium. From 2004 to 2005, Dick chaired the board of the National Association of College and University Business Officers, and was a member of that board for more than six years.



R2LP, cont.
The $3.6 million R2LP receives for the ERF grant will fund centers of educational excellence at four Providence preschool centers – Federal Hill House, Genesis Center, John Hope Settlement House and West End Community Center. With support from early literacy mentors and coaches, teachers at these centers will learn and apply instructional techniques supporting the development of language and early literacy skills. The classrooms will provide rich environments designed to improve early reading and writing skills, and teachers will learn how to use assessment tools to identify and help children who are most at risk of early reading difficulty.

R2LP, a school readiness initiative, is currently in its second year of an ERF grant it received in 2004. Preliminary first-year evaluation data indicated substantial increases in the overall quality of classrooms in supporting early language and literacy development, as well as significant differences in children’s scores as measured by the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (PALS-PreK).

The $3.2 million Professional Development grant will fund a research-based program for early childhood educators. In partnership with the Community College of Rhode Island, Wheelock College and the Providence Public Library, Ready to Learn Providence and The Providence Plan have developed a rigorous program in which 200 early childhood educators, including family-care providers, will receive 250 hours of intervention over an 18-month period. This will include 135 hours of college-level coursework, 55 hours of on-the-job mentoring, and 60 hours of participation in R2LP clubs and other leadership activities. These 200 educators have the capacity to serve more than 1,000 children each year.

The Education Alliance at Brown University will conduct the evaluation of both programs using scientifically-based methods designed to measure the impact of the intervention and child outcomes. [top]

Student Mobility , cont.
The most frequent district changes occurred between the cities of Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls and Cranston. The exchange of students between Providence and Pawtucket and Providence and Central Falls was fairly even, but the number of students moving from Providence into Cranston was three times higher than those making the reverse move.

The rate of student mobility among minorities (25 to 27 percent) was found to be nearly twice as high as that of non-Hispanic whites (14 percent).

Studies have suggested a correlation between student mobility and poor educational performance. As a next step in this statewide analysis, ProvPlan will further examine this phenomenon. Thanks to the implementation of the universal student identifier, the State will better understand the impacts of mobility at the student, school, and district scale. [top]

Inclusionary Zoning , cont.
“It’s very important that the balance between incentives for the developers and the number of required affordable units is right,” says Bert Cooper, who facilitated the planning group and is MCP’s Family Economic Success coordinator. “This program is not a silver bullet,” Bert notes, “but just one part of what must be a larger effort to increase the stock of affordable housing.” If the ordinance is adopted, and if current development patterns continue, the inclusionary zoning program would add about 300 affordable housing units to the city’s current inventory in the next five years, according to Bert.

In addition to adding affordable units for a diverse labor force, inclusionary zoning fosters mixed-income communities and provides a consistent regulatory framework to guide affordability in the market.

Rhode Island Jobs with Justice, Rhode Island ACORN and the Housing Network of Rhode Island were instrumental in acquiring the resources for PolicyLink to conduct the study. Additional advisors to the study include Local Initiatives Support Corporation, The Providence Plan, the Providence Mayor’s Office, the Providence Department of Planning and Development, and Rhode Island Housing.

Making Connections Providence, which has close ties with The Providence Plan, is a 10-year initiative of the Annie E. Casey Foundation that got under way in 2001. It operates in three target Providence neighborhoods – South Providence, the West End and Elmwood. [top]