Chopping Block

lack of support: Damon Pannell and the YVRP will escape potential funding cuts, but sister programs may not.
Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Important community programs could wither thanks to a budget bungle.

by Doron Taussig

Last Thursday afternoon, when more than 100 people crammed into the basement of Mother African Zoar United Methodist Church in North Philadelphia to protest the potential gutting of the city's Community Based Prevention Services budget, there were two feelings buzzing in the air.

The first was a sense of disbelief. In order to receive $50 million from the commonwealth, the city has to produce $10.5 million in matching funds, which, because of a miscommunication between the two governments, it didn't include in its budget. But there are ways out — the state could waive the matching requirement, or the city could dip into its surplus. This created an impression that the cuts would not actually come to pass. Even as the protesters planned a rally at City Hall (scheduled for Wednesday, June 22) and signed an enormous report card for state legislators (they got an "F"), they seemed to be going through the motions, believing they were being used as pawns in a politicians' game.

The second feeling was fear. There was a lurking sense of "what if?" — as in, what if the politicians go all in and bet that the blame for this calamity will fall on someone else? There's been a lot of talk about who should fix this; what if no one does?

The Philadelphia Department of Human Services has budgeted more than $97 million for prevention services — programs that offer services for at-risk youth before something goes wrong — in fiscal year 2006. More than half of that money is now up in the air. According to David Fair, DHS's director of community-based prevention services, there are three possible ways to slice the budget: the city could cut an equal proportion of funding from all prevention programs; it could preserve after-school programs and gut everything else; or it could save just anti-delinquency programs.

"The mayor," says Fair, "gets to make the final decision."

What follows is not an exhaustive survey. Myriad programs, including the popular Mural Arts Program, are on the chopping block. Others, like the celebrated Youth Violence Reduction Partnership [Cover story, "Crime Choppers," Trey Popp, May 5, 2005] — which was recently heralded in front of a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee field hearing at the National Constitution Center — don't draw funding from the grant in question, but rely on programs that do for supportive services. The following are samples from each of the major prevention fields that Philadelphia could see depleted on July 1.

After-School and Youth Development Programs

A string bean of a 10-year-old girl dressed in pink and baby blue has just finished designing "the Hand Award" — an outline of a large hand on construction paper. She hasn't yet decided to whom to award it, or for what. Other children knit and make papier-mâché. A small group of girls recite their favorite camp activities: "the zoo," they say, "swimming, movies."

During the school year, the Children's Village Child Care Center provides help with homework, a hot dinner and child care until 6 p.m. to the children of Chinatown for a nominal fee. Last Thursday, the center began its summer session: full days of education disguised as fun. Center director Mary Graham says most of her 100-plus students come from low-income households where English is the second language, and benefit greatly from this extra help. She points out one girl who came to the program without speaking a word of English, and has since become an honor student.

Indeed, after-school programs keep children off the streets during high-risk hours (most juvenile crimes are committed between the end of the school day and the end of the work day), and are correlated with improvements in school attendance and academic performance. There are more than 200 such program sites in Philly, and many stand to be affected by the proposed cuts. Graham estimates that 40 percent of Children's Village funding comes from DHS; it's "a huge help," she says, that enables her to do the additional fun stuff, like trips to the zoo, which cost a little extra money.

If the cuts happen, "kids won't go on trips, or get extra homework care," she says. "We would have to do a much smaller program."

Parenting Programs

In the very same Family Court halls that parents sit in on weekday mornings, waiting to explain themselves to a judge, another group of parents has gathered to celebrate "Parent Appreciation Day." They are participants in Parent Project, a program run by the Family Court in cooperation with DHS.

One such parent is Philip Wilkerson, a round-headed bald man who is passing out fliers promoting Christianity. Wilkerson sought out the parenting program because he was having trouble disciplining his 9-year-old, but has since learned effective strategies, such as short but strict time-outs. Another father, Ben Graves, took three parenting programs. When he began, he said, he would get home from work and "the house was just razed." Now, after learning to schedule chores, his home is clean and orderly.

DHS funds about 6,500 parenting slots, and the programs are correlated with family reunification and decrease of re-entry into DHS services. Since 2003, 609 parents have taken Parent Project, and 249 have graduated — but, says an administrator, all of the program's funding comes from DHS. Without it, Parent Project may very well fold.

Truancy and Delinquency Prevention Programs

According to Isaiah Givens, Philadelphia could easily have had at least one more juvenile homicide this year. The Southwest Philadelphian has a son who gets into fights in school and cuts classes. His daughter had similar problems three years ago, and Givens went down to Family Court seeking help. He was referred to the Reasonable Efforts on Assessment Access and Prevention (REAAP) program which, essentially, assigns a probation officer to a child before the child commits a crime. The officer checks in on the child periodically, refers him or her to necessary services and generally puts the fear of God into him. The extra attention makes a difference, Givens says, adding that "the people that cared, the concern, the follow-through," all came together to help his daughter graduate from high school and begin attending the Chubb Institute.

As for Givens' son, the boy confided in his REAAP case manager that he was contemplating homicide to retaliate for a fight. He was placed in the Horsham clinic, and then in preventive aftercare.

"He's back home now, and doing better, thank God," says Givens. "There could've been a murder instead of his being evaluated."

Truancy programs run the same sort of interference in response to absence from school. And they're correlated with a 40 percent improvement in attendance rate, according to an analysis of school district data by the University of Pennsylvania. Of the $50 million currently in jeopardy, about $6 million is slated for 3,000 spaces in truancy programs, and another $6.2 million for 1,400 slots in delinquency prevention.