Promise Neighborhoods and the Importance of Community

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.

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.

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.

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.

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