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(9) Encourage and work with the parents in participating in communal activities with major emphasis on parent-teachers associations.

(10) Teach adult classes in basic arithmetic, reading, civic affairs, and as noted in No. 7, homemaking programs.

NOTE.-Many of these programs are geared specifically for females, and consideration should be given to having several females among the national service corps members.

The national service corps members will also work with the citizens in showing them how to secure the proper city services required for neighborhood improvement and will, if necessary, undertake a true citizen-involved urban renewal program, including the planning, zoning programs, etc. In this regard, it would appear that in any given urban slum neighborhood, a major degree of clearance of the blighted area must be undertaken. If so, the national service corps members could work with the citizens in the neighborhood actually planning, developing, and carrying through this effort of rebuilding their community.

(It is important to point out for this program that through the Housing and Home Finance Agency and the Urban Renewal Administration there are funds that are available for staff and field office in order to carry out a neighborhood improvement and rehabilitation program.)

Through a series of block meetings and proper community organization, detailing programs of building and providing the necessary information and encouragement, the national service corps members could provide the needed spirit to show that urban home improvement and neighborhood rehabilitation and conservation can work.

THE PROJECT TIME

A program of this type should take no more than 2 years to develop, and to note any accurate comparison with the other neighborhood.

Unlike many other programs already suggested for the national service corps, this effort could be a joint effort with another Federal agency (namely Housing and Home Finance Agency or Urban Renewal Administration) and shows exactly how two groups can work together in support of a given program. This has a great deal of merit because they would be working with the community in developing their own programs.

Of great impact is the fact that if urban renewal is to work, so must rehabilitation. Until now it hasn't. With the support of the National Service Corps, we might show that it can.

SUMMARY

A true test of whether neighborhood improvement actually does work would come when national service corps members and their full-time involvement and direction would assist in a program of neighbhorood conservation and rehabilitation. If rehabilitation and conservation is going to work, and if the American city and its neighborhoods are going to be saved, it will require full-time professional community organization, not only for physical improvement but also for social motivation as well.

At present, many neighborhoods, rather than being rehabilitated, continue to deteriorate, and slum clearance becomes the continuing answer. The result is increased relocation problems, increased social welfare costs, and increased tension both within and without the slum clearance area.

National Service Corps members working directly with people on each given block within a pilot project area could make a significant contribution to the rebuilding and maintaining of the city.

The request to have the National Service Corps members work in Newark would be included as a major part of the program now being planned by the city of Newark, the Newark Board of Education, and Rutgers University School of Urban Studies.

The design of this project would be under the guidance of the corporation being established to carry out the purposes of that overall program.

The area selected is a major disadvantaged neighborhood in Newark's southcentral section. It is predominately Negro, low income, with an educational level of the seventh grade. (Recent census information.)

The national service corps members would work in close connection with the Newark Housing Authority, the Neighborhood Commission for Conservation and Rehabilitation, and other private and public agencies who are all a part of the Citizens Committee for the Newark South Side Project.

At present the administrative assistant to the mayor, Samuel M. Convissor, has been coordinating and directing the Newark phase of the project.

A major part of this general program would be in the area of community leadership training which would precede any formal part of the program itself.

NEWARK YOUTH OPPORTUNITIES UNLIMITED

Newark Youth Opportunities Unlimited is an organization created by the mayor of Newark at the instigation of Rutgers-the State university. It is composed of representatives of the university, the Newark city government, the board of education in Newark, the council of social agencies, the Newark Housing Authority and Urban Renewal Agency, and other local agencies and voluntary organizations.

YOU's intention is to develop and carefully test ways of encouraging culturally deprived Newark youth to express their productive potentialities. In pursuing this responsibility, YOU is guided by the conviction that these youths, like everyone, will invest their energies in those activities which promise to "pay off" in several ways:

1. By giving them a sense of doing something important-of participating in activities or tasks that they and their associates define as worthy, important, useful, respectable.

2. By giving them a sense of personal acceptance and appreciation by their intimate peers.

3. By giving them a sense that persons in authority genuinely respect their rights and interests.

4. By giving them a sense of "fun" and "enjoyment," as those are defined in their circles.

On the basis of that conviction, YOU proposes to test out, under as controlled conditions as possible, several specific ways of (a) creating activities with the characteristics described above; (b) making those activities readily available and known to culturally deprived youths; (c) improving youths' incentives to take advantage of such opportunities; and (d) reducing the attractiveness of other, destructive activities through which many socially disadvantaged youths now achieve the "pay offs" described above. Among the ways of doing those four things that YOU is now seeking to refine and implement are these:

1. In one school, matched with a control school, an effort will be made to harness group pressures in the service of academic effort and to stimulate students' motivations to work more vigorously on their school subjects by offering fre quent and substantial prizes through PTA's to the classes showing the greatest rate of improvement between successive marking periods. These prizes will be things including perhaps cash-for which the students themselves express a strong desire. In order to guard against injustice to classes whose already high averages bar significant improvement, similar prizes will also be given to classes with the highest absolute records. For similar reasons, prizes will also be given to individuals with records of significant improvement and with high absolute records.

2. In another school, we will leave the incentive system untouched and attempt, experimentally, to vary teaching methods in accordance with the best judgment of the professional educators in YOU. For example, significantly lower teacherstudent ratios might be tried; new textbooks; teachers' aids, in the form of National Service Corps men, local volunteers, or paid assistants; remedial reading clinics; and so on.

3. In a third school, we will leave both the incentive system and the teaching methods unchanged, and organize tutorial or "study sessions" with students after school hours, in the evening. This will also be done with the help of National Service Corps men, local volunteers, or paid assistants.

4. In a fourth school, we will inaugurate all three experimental programs simultaneously.

5. In at least one school district we will organize a prekindergarten "conceptual development" program for 3- or 4-year-old children in order to test ways of improving their "reading readiness."

6. In from three to six neighborhoods, we will help teenagers (through training, provision of minimum adult supervision, and through financial subsidy) to organize recreation centers of their own choosing. These may range from pool

parlors, through coffee and soft-drink shops, to jukebox dancing places. In addition, either in connection with such recreational centers or independently, we will help teenagers and younger children to organize bands, dance groups, and hobby shops.

In all these activities, our emphasis will be not only on providing facilities but, at least equally, on giving youth opportunity, incentive, and training in responsible management of their own enterprises.

7. For reasons similar to those just mentioned, and in addition for the purpose of creating job opportunities, we propose to organize crews of youths to engage in the following activities:

(a) Auto repair and spare-part repair and exchange.

(b) Lawn maintenance in surrounding suburbs and in city-owned housing projects, parks, and other places.

(c) Painting and repair of privately owned buildings at landlord expense. (We intend to make use, in this connection, of a city ordinance permitting the city to bring deteriorated buildings up to standard and to charge the landlord for the expense.)

(d) Construction, maintenance, and equipping of vacant lots for playgrounds.

(e) Snow and ice removal.

(f) Conducting younger children on "horizon-expanding" tours (with adult supervision).

(g) House cleaning.

(h) Sanitation maintenance in designated blocks.

(i) Clearing and maintaining campsites for neighborhood use in county, State, and National parks.

(j) Assisting in neighborhood day camps.

8. We will establish, in selected experimental neighborhoods, "Guided Group Interaction" meetings, patterned after the highly successful Essexfield and Highfields Centers in New Jersey, but with prevention as the aim, rather than treatment of juvenile offenders. It will be the aim of these meetings to help youths (a) to find their way out of the defensive adjustment they have inevitably made to a situation of no incentives and little opportunity; and (b) to see and understand, realistically, the alternatives open to them and the consequences of choosing one rather than another alternative.

9. Partly in order to provide employment, and partly to enlist the cooperation of indigenous adult leaders, we will employ and train local adults to staff the many projects described above, and to be described below.

10. We will establish in three to six neighborhoods decentralized "Urban Information and Aid Centers." By arrangement with the welfare department, we will attempt to make the centers attractive to and known by residents by making them distribution centers for surplus commodities. Our primary purpose, however, will be to experiment in such centers with different ways of "reaching out" to residents with social work services, and of coordinating the work of the several different public and private agencies on municipal, county, and State levels with which many disadvantaged residents have contact. More specifically:

(a) In one neighborhood, we might locate, in the center, representatives of the State Board of Child Welfare, the County Welfare Department, and the City Health and Welfare Department, in addition to appropriate private agencies. The effort would be to explore the efficacy of thus centralizing— but on a very local level-the various bureaucracies dispensing welfare aid.

(b) In another neighborhood, we might staff the Information and Aid Center with professional personnel who have no formal affiliation with existing agencies, in order to explore ways in which they can come to be liaison agents between residents and the bureaucracies with which they deal. (c) In still another neighborhood, the Information and Aid Center will be headquarters for National Service Corps men, or local volunteers, who will work under the direction of one or more professional directors. Each corpsman or volunteer will be assigned to one block, with the task of getting to know, intimately, all the families on his block, referring, escorting, and representing them to agencies whose services they need; encouraging parents to participate in PTA's, Neighborhood Councils, etc.; and helping them to take advantage of the various opportunities described elsewhere in this review.

(d) The attractiveness of at least one of the Information and Aid Centers might be increased, experimentally, by making it, in addition to or instead of a distribution center for surplus commodities, a place to which residents could turn for anything from a place to read, play cards, drink coffee, get advice, find a "friend in court," baby-sitting services, or home economics education and training.

(e) In at least one and probably more of the centers, we will experiment, in cooperation with the Travelers' Aid Society, with ways of identifying newcomers to the city and helping them to become quickly and smoothly integrated into the new urban environment.

11. Both as part of and in addition to the work of such Urban Information and Aid Centers, we propose to seek ways of tying Aid to Dependent Children and other types of welfare payments into educational and training programs for the adult recipients.

12. We will organize teenage and young adult clubs to receive training in how to deal with urban complexities. This plan is based on our view that the urban homolog of rural 4-H clubs' focus on animal husbandry is a focus on bureaucratic-legal rights and obligations and mechanisms of enforcement.

13. We will, particularly in the experimental schools described above, organize inservice seminaries for teachers and other school personnel (counselors, social workers, nurses, etc.). The purpose of these seminars will be both to provide school personnel with a better understanding of the special problems, nature, and potentials of their students; and to provide a forum in which teachers can exchange, develop, and refine their ideas for improving the performance of their professional functions.

In order more fully to recognize and reward the conscientious and imaginative performance by teachers of their very difficult tasks, we propose to find ways of publicly rewarding teachers who propose the best ideas for improved methods and content.

14. Efforts will be made to stimulate reading and the use of library facilities by greatly increasing the supply of books available in experimental areas and perhaps employing an incentive system similar to those described with respect to the performance of students in the classroom.

15. In addition to the evaluation of each of the foregoing experiments by Rutgers-the State university, all of the action programs will be constantly guided and informed by the results of the research project, support for which is now being requested from the Office of Education.

Now we have a panel from Rutgers. We want to give our State university equal time with our host university, Princeton.

STATEMENTS OF MARSHALL STALLEY, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, URBAN STUDIES CENTER, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY; BRADFORD ABERNETHY, CHAPLAIN OF RUTGERS UNIVERSITY; AND ERIC MOSS, INSTITUTE OF LABOR RELATIONS, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY Mr. STALLEY. My name is Marshall Stalley. I am assistant director of the Urban Studies Center of Rutgers, the State university. On my right is Bradford Abernethy, the chaplain of Rutgers, and on my left, Eric Moss, a student from Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, who is presently working with the Institute of Labor Relations at the Rutgers Labor Education Center.

During the past months Eric Moss has been assigned to a project in the city of Perth Amboy studying and working with the Puerto Ricans.

I might first indicate that we in the Urban Studies Center of Rutgers are very deeply interested in this program and fully support it. There has been one aspect which perhaps has not been fully mentioned, and that is that this program is a two-way street. The people on the receiving end will benefit, but also we think the program will be

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of considerable value to those people themselves who give their services as volunteers.

The people who live in the central city, the undereducated, the undertrained, the underutilized, and the people who have had the benefit of training and of education, constitute two different worlds. The so-called Domestic Peace Corps, the National Service Corps, will provide a national brokerage service to bring together the needs and the great, potential resources which exist. We are confident that this program will very much enlarge and extend the amount of volunteer participation by providing a link which is presently nonexistent through the brokerage function of the National Peace Corps.

I think it might be helpful if we hear from Bradford Abernethy, our chaplain.

Mr. ABERNETHY. Senator Williams, I speak against a background of familiarity with volunteer work camps in the capacity of director of work camps both in this country and abroad with the American Friends Service Committee, and in Africa with Operation Crossroads Africa. I approach this program from the standpoint of one who has been very intimately involved in the direction of volunteer work camps, and also from the standpoint of one who has encouraged a good many students to participate in them.

I think there is not an exact parallel between the volunteer work camps with which I have been familiar and the National Service Corps. The former are for a restricted age group and for a restricted period of time, a summer; in the case of the oversea work camps there is undoubtedly an element of novelty in being in a new and unusual culture. But I think there is enough parallel to draw some inferences from the one in relation to the other.

One of these inferences it seems to me is the educational advantage to the participant. This is not to be underestimated.

I have seen in a good many instances vocational ideas clarified by participation in a volunteer work camp either in this country or abroad. There is a tremendous amount of growing up that takes place.

I may mention here a letter which I got yesterday from the parents of a student with whom I have been closely associated during the last couple of years and who participated in one of these work camps. The father wrote to say what a joy it was to see the transformation which had taken place from a self-centered selfish brat, as he referred to his son, to a young man who is a mature, responsible citizen.

I am all in favor of anything which brings about such a transformation.

A second advantage, I think, is the educational advantage to the community which is provided by a volunteer work camp.

Now, a community which finds or feels itself to be a case study is apt to be resentful toward some of the efforts made toward improvement. There can be a kind of meddling involved, even a holy meddling. Meddling is bad enough, but when it becomes holy it becomes a little worse.

But there is more than study, as I see it, in this kind of plan or program. There is service, and the service which involves a dual relationship between those who are coming into the community and those who are there and going to stay there. This is to me a tremendous educational advantage to the community.

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