Educational Alliance Tests New Program To Teach Low-Income Parents

By: Lindsey Christ

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A new program is bringing parents back to class in the same community that their children are educated in, and experts hope it will improve the prospects of low-income families. NY1’s Lindsey Christ filed the following report.

Rina Godoy drops her daughter Angelina at pre-kindergarten then goes upstairs to her own class.

“The two of us go to school together,” said Angelina.

It's a pilot program to see if getting low-income parents through college improves the educational outcomes of their children.

“If the family's academic level will increase, gradually their earning capacity will increase and the whole cycle of poverty that has been perpetuated in our society will start improving,” said Robin Bernstein, president and CEO of the Educational Alliance.

For decades, the Educational Alliance has run Head Start pre-kindergarten programs for students living below the poverty line on the Lower East Side, but research suggests the boost students get from Head Start doesn't last.

“In this community, 32 percent of high school students graduate. So what happened to the 68 percent that didn't? Those are our Head Start families,” said Bernstein.

Many of the parents are immigrants, and almost all have given up on school.

“We're talking about people who are 20, 25 years old. They're young and nobody has aspirations for them, but we do,” said Bernstein.

The Alliance started what it believes is the first comprehensive program to get parents through college, learning in the same community as their children with all the same social supports.

“This is a relatively inexpensive model of kind of connecting the dots of a lot of programs and services that already exist,” said Bernstein.

CUNY's Borough of Manhattan Community College is providing the classes. The 58 parents who've enrolled this fall are taking English as a second language and GED prep courses to start.

The Alliance plans to support them all the way through college graduation.

NYU's School of Education will conduct research to see whether this really works, but the idea has won support. More than a million dollars in grants will keep things going for at least three years.

By then, Angelina will be in elementary school, and Rena hopes she'll be on her way to a career in social services.