Last week, the Department of Education announced a new round of Promise Neighborhood funding, including some new planning grants as well as the first implementation grants. The New America Foundation’s Early Ed Watch has all the background. The implementation grants went to organizations in Buffalo; Hayward, California; San Antonio, rural Kentucky, and Minneapolis. (Sondra Samuels, the C.E.O. of the Northside Achievement Zone, the Minneapolis group that was awarded an implementation grant, is pictured above.)

Who is likely to get the Promise Neighborhoods designations? Potential applicants are sorting through their competitive advantages and disadvantages. Those with histories of foundation support and backing have something of a leg up in generating matching dollars, such as the Highline School District in and around Seattle, which boasts a decade of involvement from the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Making Connections project. An impending Los Angeles County application boasts the involvement of a funders consortium including the California Endowment and the Annenberg Foundation. For the Dwight neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut, long the focus of planning efforts over the years, the presence of Yale as a neighbor constitutes a level of institutional and technical credibility.

Meanwhile, there was plenty of local coverage of specific applicants, including stories, editorials, and letters from Charleston, South Carolina; Rochester, New York; St. Paul, Minnesota; Norwich, Connecticut; Athens, Georgia; Las Vegas; northeast Ohio; and a Native American community in rural Colorado.

The mothers and fathers who received their diplomas at Giffen Elementary School in the city’s South End ran the gamut of race, age and education. They were all recruited from agencies that serve the poorest neighborhoods of the city. Some mothers have one or two children, others recently gave birth, and others are pregnant with their first child.

The idea is to provide parents “with the tools and techniques to become the first teachers of their children,” said Common Council member Barbara Smith, an alliance member who helped spearhead the baby program. She attended every session at the school, which ran from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturdays. The participants had to have children no older than 3.

A year ago, Common Councilwoman Barbara Smith was daydreaming about a whole community working to give some of its poorest children a chance at college and a better life. She was reading about the Harlem Children’s Zone, the nationally celebrated initiative to reach every child in a 97-block section of New York City and provide them and their families with social, health and educational services from the early years all the way through college.

Now, Smith and a group of parents, educators and concerned citizens, are quickly moving forward with a similar vision for students in the city of Albany. The Children’s Zone has come to Albany at lightning speed, moving from a concept to classroom-level implementation in less than a year.

And in the Hechinger Institute’s “EarlyStories” blog, some thoughts on the Albany news, on Baby College, and on “Whatever It Takes.”

A group of educators, parents and elected officials has been quietly laboring for a year to establish an anti-poverty corridor in Albany that is based on Harlem Children’s Zone, an ambitious initiative to reach every child in a 100-block section of New York City and provide them and their families with social, health and educational services from birth all the way through college graduation. …

President Barack Obama’s administration has earmarked $10 million in its 2010 budget to plan how it will make Harlem Children’s Zone a national model called Promise Neighborhoods Initiative that will expand to 20 cities across the country. Details of the federal plan have not yet been released, but applications are expected to be accepted next year. Councilwoman Barbara Smith wants to ensure that Albany is on that list and she is not willing to wait for Washington before starting such a program here.