Does Your Neighborhood Show Promise, Comrade ?

From the indoctrination specialists and propagandists at the Department of Education (which doesn't really educate children, but I digress. Emphasis added where appropriate, snarky comments in [brackets].)

"Program Description Program Office: Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) CFDA Number: 84.215P (Planning) and 84.215N (Implementation)

Program Type: Discretionary/Competitive Grants [Kiss your money goodbye, prole!]

Program Description: Promise Neighborhoods, established under the legislative authority of the Fund for the Improvement of Education Program (FIE), [also known as "not Congress"] provides funding to support eligible entities, including (1) nonprofit organizations, which may include faith-based nonprofit organizations, (2) institutions of higher education, and (3) Indian tribes.

The vision of the program is that all children and youth growing up in Promise Neighborhoods have access to great schools and strong systems of family and community support that will prepare them to attain an excellent education and successfully transition to college and a career. The purpose of Promise Neighborhoods is to significantly improve the educational and developmental outcomes of children and youth in our most distressed communities, and to transform those communities by—

1. Identifying and increasing the capacity of eligible entities that are focused on achieving results for children and youth throughout an entire neighborhood;

2. Building a complete continuum of cradle-to-career solutions of both educational programs and family and community supports, with great schools at the center;

3. Integrating programs and breaking down agency 'silos' so that solutions are implemented effectively and efficiently across agencies; [This is called direct control by Washington, comrades.]

4. Developing the local infrastructure of systems and resources needed to sustain and scale up proven, effective solutions across the broader region beyond the initial neighborhood; and

5. Learning about the overall impact of the Promise Neighborhoods program and about the relationship between particular strategies in Promise Neighborhoods and student outcomes, including through a rigorous evaluation of the program.

In 2010, the Promise Neighborhoods program awarded one-year grants to support the development of a plan to implement a Promise Neighborhood in 21 [Wow! 21! Talk about a cowinkydink!] communities across the country that included the core features described above. At the conclusion of the planning grant period, grantees should have a feasible plan to implement a continuum of solutions that will significantly improve results for children in the community being served.

In 2011, the Department awarded a second round of planning grants and a first round of implementation grants. The five implementation grants and 15 planning grants will reach an additional 16 communities throughout the United States in order to help revitalize disadvantaged neighborhoods. Promise Neighborhoods is now in 18 states and the District of Columbia.

In subsequent years, contingent on the availability of funds, the Department intends to conduct competitions for new implementation and planning grants. While all ~~eligible entities~~ [left-wing commie front groups--fixed] will be able to apply for implementation grants, eligible entities that have effectively carried out the planning activities described in the Notice Inviting Applications, whether independently or with a Promise Neighborhoods planning grant, are likely to be well positioned with the plan, commitments, data, and demonstrated organizational leadership and capacity necessary to develop a quality application for an implementation grant."

Now, of course, you can't build a fascist omelette without breaking a few eggs...or burning a few Reichstags. Plots like this need some oomph.

Let's hear from Arne Duncan, the Reichsfuhrer of the Department of Education, about this largesse from the masterminds who infest the Federal Leviathan : (Remember, emphasis will be added where appropriate and snarky comments from yours truly will be in [brackets].)

"Thanks to the Chavez Middle School band and the Thomas Elementary school children's choir. Thank you for that beautiful music.

It's a bittersweet day today. We need to listen carefully to the voices of children at this moment. We need to savor their innocence, and applaud their unquenchable appetite for self-expression and renewal. Today--let me start with a piece of great news. Today, we're announcing the winners of a new round of Promise Neighborhood grants.

As most of you know, Promise Neighborhoods are cradle-to-career initiatives that call on all parts of the community to provide comprehensive wraparound supports to surround great schools, such as high-quality early learning, rich after-school activities, mental health services, and crime prevention. [In other words, the Federal Leviathan must take full control for your community, all in the mane of the "public good", comrade.]

I'm so pleased to announce that the DC Promise Neighborhood Initiative, or DCPNI, has won a $25 million implementation award. DCPNI is one of seven partnerships around the nation that won implementation awards today. Ten additional communities have won planning grants.

We had many, many more strong applicants than we had dollars available—I wish we could have funded the important work going on in many other communities. And I hope that other applicants, who didn't win grants this time, continue to press ahead with this comprehensive, collaborative, and critical work.

I congratulate DCPNI and its partners for not only uniting the Kenilworth Parkside community around a common vision, but for doing so with a rigorous, research-based approach to bettering the lives of all young people in the community. And I applaud the community for taking a broad and comprehensive view of supporting their children.

The hub of DCPNI efforts will be two elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school. But you have put together a tremendous coalition of more than 30 partners, including the city government, the DC public schools, hospitals and health centers, family support organizations, and the DC Housing Authority police.

I'm thrilled to see DC Mayor Gray, DC police chief Cathy Lanier, and DC's school chancellor, Kaya Henderson, are all here today.

The hunger for this kind of work in the nation is huge. More than 200 applicants applied for this round of Promise Neighborhood grants.

So many communities are eager today to provide equal access and support to disadvantaged children. So many communities are desperate to replace the cradle-to-prison pipeline with a cradle-to-career pipeline--that's what we all are fighting for.

The winners of implementation grants today range from big-city Los Angeles to small-town Indianola, Mississippi. In Corning, California, the Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians won a planning grant. Promise Neighborhood grants are so important because they engage the entire community—they ask everyone to work together. They ask everyone to take responsibility for helping children.

Children in many communities across the country deserve a stronger opportunity structure than we as adults have provided them. This is an amazing chance to rebuild the social compact with our young people.

The concept at the heart of this program—community-based and comprehensive—is equally relevant to a much more painful conversation America began, once again, last week in the wake of the horrific massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. [Never let a good crisis go to waste!]

Losing six dedicated educators and 20 first-grade students in a matter of minutes to a disturbed young man with access to weapons designed for war is forcing us all to confront some very difficult questions. I don't pretend to have all the answers. But since last Friday, I think the world has changed. Much like with 9/11, many Americans will forever remember where they were when they heard the awful news of the shootings. [Translation: The Obama Regime equates law abiding gun-owners to al-Qaeda.]

On Wednesday, I went up to Newtown to talk privately with teachers and school staff from Sandy Hook Elementary School and to attend the wake for their heroic principal, Dawn Hochsprung. And I can tell you that the sense of loss and grief there is overpowering.

No child, no parent, no family, no community should have to go through what this community is going through. They are strong. They are resilient. They are united. But they will be forever changed.

We have to make sure we learn from this awful tragedy as communities and as a nation. Every community needs to appraise its values and look at whether the community, parents, business leaders, faith-based leaders, political leaders, and schools are doing everything that they can to keep our nation's children safe from harm.

This is a collective responsibility. None of us gets a pass. It's not the time to point fingers. But we absolutely have to reassess a number of our society's value choices on issues like easy access to guns and limited access to mental health services.

We have to look at family engagement and the role of parents. And let's honestly evaluate the cultural messages we send that glorify gun violence or harden too many young people to its costs. At the prayer vigil in Newtown on Sunday night, President Obama spoke of the fact that it comes as a bit of a shock to parents to recognize that 'no matter how much you love [your] kids, you can't do it by yourself. That this job of keeping our children safe, and teaching them well, is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community, and the help of a nation.'

So, are we doing enough to keep our children safe from harm? Are we allowing our children to grow up free of fear? I don't think so--and neither does the President. Newtown wasn't the first school shooting. A decade ago, it happened in Colorado. After that was Virginia Tech – taking 32 lives. And there have been other massacres outside of schools.

Meanwhile, in cities all across America – especially in low-income communities – young lives are lost due to senseless gun violence at a rate that is absolutely staggering.

This is very personal to me. As a child who grew up in my mother's after-school tutoring program on the South Side of Chicago, I had a number of friends and mentors in the program who were gunned down at a young age. These were tragedies that were very tough to come to grips with as a 10 year-old.

As CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, I attended far too many funerals of students. I went to too many homes of parents who had just lost their 10-year-old or 11-year-old child. I walked into too many classrooms with a desk that would be empty forever--and tried to explain the inexplicable to a class of grieving friends.

Nothing, nothing in my job was more difficult—and nothing made me more aware of how adults, myself included, were failing not just children but entire communities.

Like many of you, I am a parent of school-age children. And we all have to start by having honest conversations with our kids about what happened in Newtown. The worst thing to do would be to try to sweep this tragedy under the rug.

My wife and I have been honest with our son and daughter, both of whom are in elementary school. They've been thinking about this a lot, as I know millions of children across the country have. I tell our kids that we need to do everything we can to keep them, and their friends, safe--because they deserve better than to be fearful at school, or at a park, or the mall, or before they go to sleep at night.

We also have to help teachers and principals deal with their own fears. We ask so much of them – but we should never expect them to put their lives on the line – and yet they did. We owe it to these brave, heroic educators to summon just a little of the courage they had and do more to prevent these horrible tragedies.

At the President's direction, Vice President Biden is convening a group of four Cabinet secretaries to make recommendations next month to the President about how to reduce gun violence and prevent future mass shootings.

I am a member of that group, and we have met twice this week already. We have a broad charge to come up with comprehensive recommendations that the President, Congress, states, and communities can act upon soon to address this complex, difficult problem.

The President has started the conversation by offering some common-sense ideas: renewing an assault weapons ban; limiting high-capacity ammunition clips; closing the gun show loopholes that allow criminals to acquire guns without a background check. And he has promoted more meaningful background checks and better enforcement of existing laws. [Would any of this have stopped the Newtown shooting ? No, but why let facts get in the way ? Forward, comrades!]

Reasonable people should be able to agree on these restrictions. [And if not, Obama's thugs and his willing collaborators in the arrogant and lazy media will make them wish they were never born.] As the President has pointed out, many of these ideas are backed by members of the NRA and were in fact supported by President Reagan. [Lie. Ronald Reagan said this in 1983, only two years after being shot: 'You won't get gun control by disarming law-abiding citizens. There's only one way to get real gun control: Disarm the thugs and the criminals, lock them up and if you don't actually throw away the key, at least lose it for a long time... It's a nasty truth, but those who seek to inflict harm are not fazed by gun controllers. I happen to know this from personal experience.']

My friend, Joe Manchin, the [Democrat] senator from West Virginia, summed up the new consensus well. He is a lifelong hunter and a lifetime member of the NRA.

He said he doesn't 'know anyone in the sporting and hunting arena who goes out with an assault rifle. [He] doesn't know anyone who needs 30 rounds in the clip to go hunting.'

So I ask—I beg, I plead--let's make real and rapid progress on that front. But let's go further and ask what we can do as a community to dramatically reduce gun violence. What can we expect of each other? What responsibilities go along with the right to own guns?

We all need to make this personal. Imagine if that was our child in that classroom in Connecticut—or if our wife or sister was one of those who gave her life to protect other people's children. What would we do differently? What would we ask of others?

Let's have a conversation about mental health. Are we doing enough? Can people get access to the help they need? Are we doing enough to ensure that information about mentally ill individuals who pose a violent threat is shared on schools and campuses? [Adios, HIPAA laws.]

This is the time to come together, to prove that the naysayers about America's capacity to change are wrong. We have no other choice, but to do everything in our power to make our schools and our communities, safe havens. [Regardless of whether or not it's Constitutional, comrade.]

When the American people put their mind to something, I have great faith that we will see real change in our schools. And I believe communities everywhere can and will reaffirm the sacred trust of keeping all of our children safe.

In the coming weeks I plan on spending a lot of time visiting schools and communities—in cities, suburbs, and rural areas—to talk about this issue.

I want to talk to gun owners and hunters and sport shooters and ask them, what should we do?

I want to talk about community and responsibility, and I want to talk about values—because we have common values that go far beyond the constitutional right to bear arms.

We value our children. We value our safety. We value our freedom to go to a movie theater or house of worship and do what we want to do so long as we are not compromising the freedom of others.

We value the right to live our daily lives and pursue our dreams, without fear. [And we will have our utopia whether you like it or not, comrade.]

But last week, the dreams of 26 people from Newtown, Connecticut were cut short at an elementary school because one disturbed young man was mad at the world.

I can't help wondering what he might have done, and how this might have been different, if he didn't have access to those guns. Maybe he would just be punching his pillow, and his mother would still be here to give him support.

And there would be 26 families from Newtown, Connecticut, preparing to celebrate the holidays, instead of arranging funerals.

Good ol’ Jacob Zuma. He sure knows how to fire up an African National Congress/ South African Communist Party crowd, doesn’t he ?

I asked my uncle how he deals with the violence, especially on a farm, especially since over 3000 Boer farmers have been murdered since 1994. So far, he hasn’t had a problem, but he does keep a gun in every room in his house, including the bathrooms. (Illegally.) Sad to say, in many parts of SA, unarmed Afrikaners are dead Afrikaners.

In fact, Genocidewatch had this to say:

“The South African Government for the last 18 years has adopted a policy of deliberate government abolition and disarmament of rural Commandos run by farmers themselves for their own self-defense. The policy has resulted in a four-fold increase in the murder rate of Afrikaner commercial farmers. This policy is aimed at forced displacement through terror. It advances the goals of the South African Communist Party’s New Democratic Revolution (NPR), which aims at nationalization of all private farmland, mines, and industry in South Africa.

Disarmament, coupled with Government removal of security structures to protect the White victim group, follows public dehumanization of the victims, and facilitates their forced displacement and gradual genocide.

Afrikaner farm owners are being murdered at a rate four times the murder rate of other South Africans, including Black farm owners. Their families are also subjected to extremely high crime rates, including murder, rape, mutilation and torture of the victims. South African police fail to investigate or solve many of these murders, which are carried out by organized gangs, often armed with weapons that police have previously confiscated. The racial character of the killing is covered up by a SA government order prohibiting police from reporting murders by race. Instead the crisis is denied and the murders are dismissed as ordinary crime, ignoring the frequent mutilation of the victims’ bodies, a sure sign that these are hate crimes.

However, independent researchers have compiled accurate statistics demonstrating convincingly that murders among White farm owners occur at a rate of 97 per 100,000 per year, compared to 31 per 100,000 per year in the entire South African population, making the murder rate of White SA farmers one of the highest murder rates in the world.”

http://www.genocidewatch.org/southafrica.html

Well, look it that. Another example of how gun control adds to the body count of the innocent.

I’ve written about it before (and was promptly called a nut by some) but when you look at South Africa, you’re seeing America in 20-30 years. South Africa has every problem the US has, but they’re magnified by the Marxist-Leninist policies of the African National Congress.

I wrote about that here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2920398/posts

I think I’ll stay put....

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