Rep. Rhonda Fields of Aurora (left) was one of many African-American leaders participating in Destination Health

They walked, some even needing the aid of their walkers. They ran, some competing to win the 5K. Some walked or ran alone, some in the company of friends and family, and some in teams from their churches.

 All together, more than 400 people participated in the first Destination Health 5K Walk/Run on July 30 in Denver’s City Park. Organized by the Center for African-American Health, it was the largest gathering of African Americans for such a fitness event that anyone can remember.

 “It was like a family reunion,” said Rep. Rhonda Fields of Aurora, who put together a team of 12, family and friends, for the event. “There was Mayor Hancock, Happy Haynes and Rosemary Marshall, and many more people I knew, and many I didn’t. It was a great way to get us together to do something we don’t normally come together to do: walk.”

 “If you see City Park on any other day, you might not see more than four or five African Americans walking or running at any given time,” said Brother Jeff Fard, a board member of the Center for African-American Health.  “This event is an example that says African Americans can come out in mass and change a norm by getting up, getting active, moving around and being healthy.”

Center Targets Health Disparities of African Americans
Improving the health of African Americans is the very mission of the Center for African-American Health. Blacks comprise just 5 percent of the population in metro Denver, but in Denver and Arapahoe counties, including the neighborhoods identified by The Piton Foundation as the Children’s Corridor (link), they represent 10%.

The Center’s purpose is compelling: the African American population has higher rates of illness, disability and premature death from diseases such as diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease.

 Statistics are one lens on the problem:

• African Americans are twice as likely as whites to have diabetes.
• They have the greatest chance of having cardiovascular disease of any ethnic group and have the highest death rate from the disease.
• Blacks also have the highest death rate from cancer overall.
• And all together, they have the highest overall death rate and shortest life expectancy.

But putting statistics in the context of real people adds another important dimension to the discussion.

Rep. Fields, like most African Americans, has a family history of many of the diseases prevalent among blacks. Her grandmother had diabetes, and her mother has had cancer and suffered a stroke.

Grant Jones, the Center’s founder and executive director, has had high blood pressure for more than 20 years.

Reducing these health disparities is a complicated task, says Jones. It requires a number of behavioral and lifestyle changes.

“These are diseases that don’t have to be,” says Rep. Fields. A strong proponent of getting individuals to live a healthier lifestyle, she serves on the House Health and Environment committee and sponsored a law requiring physical activity in Colorado’s schools. She believes the Center has the right approach to reaching the African-American community with the partnerships it has with black churches and black fraternities and sororities.

Disease Prevention and Chronic Disease Management are Key
The Center for African American Health was launched in 2005 to provide the black community with better preventive health care and to improve management of the diseases that are rampant among the community. The Center offers:

• An annual health fair for African Americans each February, providing free and health screenings and health education to 1,000 people each year.
• Free community-based health screenings and referrals for diabetes, hypertension, breast cancer, prostate cancer, colorectal cancer, and other diseases.
• Year-round self-management classes for people with diabetes and other chronic diseases.
• Regular nutrition education and programs to promote active and healthy lifestyle behavior, including special programs for seniors.

The Center was initially founded in 1991 as a program of The Piton Foundation when Grant Jones was a program officer at the foundation.  It began as the Metro Denver Black Church Initiative and was renamed the Center for African-American Health in 2005.

 “Piton understood that the black church is among one of the few indigenous, stable organizations in the black community,” explains Jones. “Strengthening the capacity of local black churches to foster the development of individuals, black families and neighborhoods as a whole was a strategy that we saw as promising.”  And it is one that remains important today in Piton’s work in the Children’s Corridor. Piton was a sponsor of the Center’s Destination Health event.

 “Destination Health challenged us African Americans to put routine exercise and fitness into our lives,” said Rep. Fields.  And personally, she’s committed to meeting that challenge. “I went around City Park twice this time, or about a mile,” she said.  “Next year I’m going to do two miles.”

More than 400 people participated in the first-ever Destination Health Run/Walk held in Denver's City Park on July 30, 2011

For more information on the Center for African-American Health, go to www.caahealth.org

Although there are several high-performing schools in the Corridor, none are within a mile of the planned FasTracks stations.

As Metro Denver expands its FasTracks light rail system, the newly-formed Mile High Transit Opportunity Collaborative (MHTOC) is working to create equitable housing and economic development. A common question MHTOC hears is, “How does transportation relate to my issue?” This map demonstrates how transportation options are essential ingredients for education equity.

The Eagle P3 East Corridor light rail expansion runs through the Children’s Corridor. To better understand how transit interfaces with education quality, we mapped the light rail alignment, planned station locations and bus lines on top of child demographic disparities and school locations displayed by performance. We found that many of the planned transit-oriented development locations along the East line are not within one mile of planned stations. The stations don’t offer access to the area’s higher performing schools.

Because light rail alone does not address inequitable access to quality education, this map led us to a more promising solution in the Children’s Corridor: coordinating bus and light rail service.

Download this map as a pdf

Lunch is more than food. It’s essential fuel for learning and social growth. Proper nutrition is tied to children’s performance in school. And malnutrition, especially during early childhood, has been linked to discipline problems and lower IQs.

Students Denver Public Schools and Aurora Public Schools who qualify for FRL under-perform compared to their peers. In 2011, 43 percent of FRL-eligible third-graders were proficient in reading compared to 80 percent of non-FRL-eligible third-graders – a performance gap of 37 points. The gap was nearly as large in math, where only 39 percent of third-graders qualifying for FRL were proficient, compared to 75 percent of non-FRL students.

This map of elementary school FRL participation shows the tenuous connection between poverty, nutrition and learning. Schools in darker shades of blue have the highest FRL participation – more than 98 percent of students at Garden Place Elementary in Globeville and Smith Renaissance School of the Arts in Northeast Park Hill receive free or reduced lunches.

Download a pdf version of this map

Children in families earning incomes at or below 130 percent of the poverty level are eligible for free lunches; children from families earning between 130 and 185 percent of the poverty level are eligible for reduced-price lunches.

Explore the data:

Corridor Elementary Schools FRL Participation, 2010-2011 [Google Doc]
CSAP Performance by FRL Participation, 2010-2011, DPS and APS schools [Google Doc]

Download raw data from the source:

Colorado Department of Education / SchoolVIEW

Resources:

National School Lunch Program
National School Lunch Program Fact Sheet [pdf]

Early Excellence provides high quality (it has a 4-Star Qualistar rating) preschool education to children from two to five years old, with the goal of cognitively, socially, emotionally and physically preparing children to achieve academic success in kindergarten and beyond.

Most of the children, like Damari and Damarion Gilmore, are identified as “at risk” because of the economic circumstances of their families. Thirty percent of the children are native Spanish speakers at home.

That’s why Early Excellence also goes beyond serving only the young children that attend the early childhood education program. It also provides job development and social networks for the parents so that they can achieve self-sufficiency.

“If you have a faltering family, it’s nearly impossible for the child to succeed in school,” says Early Excellence executive director Jennifer Luke. “But if you can educate the family and help support the parent to be successful in their own career, the child also benefits.”

Early Excellence works with Denver Human Services to offer parents on TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families) volunteer opportunities, on-the-job training to become an early education teacher, and even help with job placement. Luke estimates her program has helped as many as 25 parents.

One of Early Excellence’s current teachers, Ivan Rodriguez, became interested in teaching when his own son attended Early Excellence. While he had a bachelor’s degree in business management, Rodriguez had to take classes to certify him to work in early education. Then he went on to get his master’s degree in elementary education. He is one of 10 teachers at the program, which serves 80 children in five classrooms.

“Our goal is to have them prepared for kindergarten,” said Rodriguez. “We give children a head start. By the time they get to kindergarten, they know their letters, numbers and colors. They know how to play with others and how to follow instructions.”

Early Excellence’s goal of “kindergarten-readiness” mirrors the aim of The Piton Foundation. “Research backs the wisdom of early brain development and of investing in the very early years of a child’s life,” said Terry Minger, president and CEO of The Piton Foundation.

Early Excellence also offers a variety of opportunities for parents to get involved in activities with their children. There are monthly potluck dinners, field trips to the zoo and museums, and tickets to the theater and ballet.

Early Excellence also arranges for dental services, vision screenings, and immunizations for the children.

Despite the well documented success of the program in helping both children and families, Early Excellence, like many early childhood programs, is struggling in these difficult economic times. Some centers have even shut down.

Early Excellence depends primarily on funding through the Colorado Child Assistance Program (CCAP) and the Denver Preschool Program, both of which have severely cut back their support. CCAP has cut its reimbursement rate by 10-15%, affecting about 15 of the 80 families at Early Excellence. And the waiting list for families to get on CCAP is now about two years.

The Denver Preschool Program, which provides tuition assistance for about 87% of the almost 70 four-year-olds in the program, now pays less than half of the cost of tuition, and only pays for nine months of schooling instead of a full year.

It’s hard on the program, which is determinedly seeking new sources of funding, but Luke worries more about the children and families.

“I feel like we keep re-wounding our most vulnerable families,” says Luke. She explains that the children often have to go back into traditional care, with older brothers and sisters, or neighbors or friends providing the care. “And with the children not able to attend the summer program, parents sometimes have to quit their jobs and the children are losing three months of quality education and some of the gains we’ve made in getting them school ready.”

But Luke is committed to keeping the doors to Early Excellence open. “We know that children who graduate from our program, graduate at or well-above grade level and are ready for kindergarten and beyond. We also know that our families have a dramatically higher increase in positive parenting skills.”

It’s a problem that keeps Luke and her staff up at night.

But thinking of the twins, Damari and Damarion, she pauses “With four arms to hug me, it repays all my trouble.”

To learn more about Early Excellence Program of Denver, go to eepdenver.org

 
Irene Mejia explains her happiness at being indoors attending a nutrition class on a beautiful summer afternoon by simply saying, “Now is my time.”

A wife and busy mother of a teenage daughter, Irene also is the caregiver for elderly parents and in-laws. That demanding caretaking role is further complicated by the fact that her mother has muscular dystrophy and her father has had a stroke. Neither her parents nor her in-laws speak much English.

But Irene’s English is good since she took the English as a Second Language (ESL) class at Focus Points Family Resource Center three years ago. Since then, she has enrolled in Focus Points’ Adult Basic Education class and now is studying there to get her GED.

Irene is representative of the primarily Spanish-speaking immigrant families in northeast and north central Denver that Focus Points serves. About 1,700 of them last year. Focus Points offers its programs in locations throughout the metro area as well as at their new facility in Denver’s Globeville neighborhood.

In addition to adult education classes, the agency offers parenting workshops and early childhood education. True to its mission to strengthen the entire family, while adults participate in their classes, their children are being engaged, with the goal of increasing their basic literacy and readiness for school.

Focus Points also offers in-home early childhood education to some 200 children each year through the Parents as Teachers and Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY) programs.

But now the agency is looking to start even earlier to ensure children are successful. As a major partner in the new Babies 2 College effort, Focus Points is one of several early childhood providers working to create a common vision for parents to understand how to get children into quality early childhood programs with the ultimate goal of the children going on to college.

Cooking Matters

While Irene’s daughter is not young, the 17-year old Jessica is benefitting from Focus Points’ programs as well. She’s attending the nutrition/cooking class along with her mother. A junior in high school, Jessica wants to go to culinary school and someday open her own restaurant.

Together, the mother and daughter have learned how to choose and prepare healthy foods. One week, they were taught how to save money by cutting up a whole chicken instead of buying the prepackaged breasts and thighs. Another week, the lesson was about the health benefits of choosing whole grains instead of refined grains. And always, portion size is a big emphasis.
Irene says her husband likes the idea of saving money by cutting up a whole chicken, but he’s not too crazy about the smaller portion sizes that she’s serving up. “He says ‘this is too small,’” laughs Irene. “I keep telling him he needs to eat less and he says he’ll try.”

Jessica, who admits to liking Big Macs and fries, learned just how much saturated fat is in that meal when the nutritionist from Cooking Matters had her spoon out 13 tablespoons of shortening onto a plate to demonstrate how much unhealthy fat she was getting with her burger and fries. Cooking Matters, a program that gives participants the skills, knowledge and confidence to prepare healthy and affordable meals, is one of many agencies that Focus Points partners with to deliver services to their families.

“It changed my mind about what I eat,” said Jessica who now thinks twice about the fast food meals she used to eat frequently.

As for Irene, who moved to Colorado 18 years ago, she can’t seem to learn enough. “I want to know lots of stuff,” she says. “I want to be able to communicate with people.”
And someday, when she has more freedom, she would like work as a bookkeeper.

And while Irene insists that all this learning is for her, it is clear that her extended family is benefitting. With her grasp of the English language, she is the one who translates for her and her husband’s parents when they are dealing with their doctors or when their health problems land them in the hospital. With the healthy eating information she’s learned, the whole family is eating healthier. And by furthering her education, Irene may someday even be a second wage-earner in her family.

For Irene, just like Focus Points, it truly is all about family.

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For more information on Focus Points Family Resource Center, go to www.focuspoints.org

To tackle this problem, Patty Lawless of Metropolitan Organizations for People (MOP) asked Piton to visualize school performance for Denver Public Schools in the Corridor’s Near Northeast neighborhoods.

The graphic (available here or below) – made with free Google tools – shows the relationship between School Performance Framework (SPF) ratings and Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) scores over three years.

Pressing the play button at the bottom of the graphic will animate the school data over time. Near Northeast schools are highlighted in green. Using the interactive axes, you can view the percent of students proficient in math, reading and writing. Click on a school to isolate it and compare its performance to other DPS schools.

This tool is useful for exploring previously unseen patterns in the data. For example, although Manual High School’s 2010 SPF score (47%) is nearly identical to its 2008 score (46%), in that time it increased the percent of students who are proficient or advanced twofold in math and a third in reading.

Lawless presented this graphic at MOP’s May Education committee meeting. It was so well-received, MOP asked Piton to make another graphic showing CSAP scores for Near Northeast schools over the past six years.

Explore the data:

Access the data that fuels the visualizations

DPS schools, 2008-2010 SPF and CSAP [Google Doc]

Near Northeast Schools, 2004-2010 CSAP [Google Doc]

Download raw data from the source

SPF ratings

CSAP scores

Relevant organizations:

MOP

DPS

CDE