There are dozens of college pennants pinned to the ceiling of Parramore’s Grand Avenue Neighborhood Center. They showcase the many schools, including all the major Florida universities, where neighborhood children have gone.
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The felt flags indicate how far the area, which once had a high school graduation rate of just 50%, has come due in part to a city program that brings mentorship and other support to children living in the city’s most impoverished areas.
“In the beginning, the goal was simply to get kids off the street,” said Joseph Caesar, longtime program supervisor for Orlando Kidz Zone.
Orlando Kidz Zone launched in 2006 with the aim of diverting the paths of so many wayward kids that it would create a cultural shift. Modeled after the successful Harlem Children’s Zone in New York, the program recently celebrated its 20-year anniversary. It has served 9,000 children, lifting the high school graduation rate for those children up to more than 90%. An early initiative of Mayor Buddy Dyer, Kidz Zone has been cited as a case study by Harvard researchers on ways municipalities can break cycles of intergenerational poverty.
“I’ve had students that I met at age seven and eight and they’ve gone through the program, and they’re grown and they have kids,” Caesar said. “And so now we’re really kind of seeing the generational work that we’re doing because we’re able to also impact their kids and their families.”
The program started in the Parramore Heritage Neighborhood and has since expanded to zones in Holden Heights, Mercy Drive and Englewood, with an annual budget today of $2.3 million. The neighborhoods where the program is offered have seen an 81.2% drop in juvenile arrests, a 49.7% drop in teen births and a 68% drop in child abuse and neglect cases, according to the city.
Kidz Zone takes a “cradle to career” approach, partnering with nonprofits and government agencies on initiatives that target children from birth through early adulthood. It gets children into preschools at no cost to their families so they can be better prepared for kindergarten, and offers after-school and summer activities so parents don’t have to pay for childcare.
Through a partnership with Orange County Public Schools, high schoolers in the program are assigned a student advocate who regularly meets with them, keeping them on track, connecting them to scholarships and other opportunities and helping them chart a post-high school path.
More than 90% of the children in the student advocate program were accepted into college, trade school or the military after graduating high school, according to program records.
“He’s like a mentor, really. He comes into my class to see how I’m doing, what my grades are like, what assignments I’m missing, stuff like that,” said Tyquan Hall, 15, who, like his 17-year-old brother Timothy Jorcius, enrolled in the Parramore Kidz Zone as a kindergartener.
Jerry Williams Jr., one of the boys’ mentors who has worked at Parramore Kidz Zone since 2019, takes on 25 high schoolers at a time, meeting with each of them once a week.
“We talk about everything. It’s life skills. It’s teaching them what adult life looks like,” Williams said. “I like to look at it like they get the plastic spoon, not the silver one, but the plastic one.”
Both boys are on track to graduate from Jones High School. And both work part-time jobs, which Kidz Zone helped them find.
“As a single parent, you think, ‘What if I didn’t have this?’,” said Sheykia Hall, the boys’ mother. “Because there’s a lot of kids that probably go to the same school as my kids but live in a different area and they don’t have this. So after school, they’re trying to figure out, ‘Where do they go? What can they do?’”
Kidz Zone operates out of community centers inside the designated neighborhoods. The program, and its center facilities, are open to children and young adults up until the age of 25 who live inside the zones. While at the centers, they can participate in an array of programming like reading groups, writing workshops, team sports, culinary instruction and pottery classes.
There are regular field trips to zoos, amusement parks, and Kennedy Space Center. There are also camping trips in state parks and college campus tours.
“It’s like summer camp, in a sense, but year-round,” said Alexis Hicks, Youth Employment Coordinator for the city’s Families, Parks and Recreation division.
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The idea is to expose children to things that they might otherwise have missed out on and expand their interests in an enjoyable, less rigid environment than school.
“It’s more of like a hangout. We can come be ourselves,” said Seon Victor, 19, who enrolled in Parramore Kidz Zone as a second grader. “It’s not really like school. We come here to bond with each other.”
The program helped Victor discovered his love for writing. He recently completed his first novel and hopes to get the manuscript published.
“I created a whole world of like characters and people and a whole story that really is very, very dark but very amazing,” Victor said with pride.
Participating in the educational activities is not a requirement. Children are free to just hang out in rooms furnished with bean-bag chairs, video games, surround sound speakers, big screen televisions and plenty of snacks.
“This is their space. They get to do whatever they want, with limitations and supervision, obviously,” Hicks, who is also an alumnus of Parramore Kidz Zone, said.
The program also has parent advocates that meet monthly with families to connect them with additional services, like local food banks, mental health counseling and other support.
“Because what we found is, if you only work with the kids, you’re not able to get to the real issues that the family is having,” Caesar said. “Individual kids are not suffering from food insecurity. Individual kids are not necessarily suffering with low wages. That’s kind of a family issue.”
There’s a career development program where children are taught employment skills and financial literacy and get to open their own bank accounts. The program partners with local businesses where children work through an 8-week paid internship program, earning $14 an hour for 15 hours a week.
Jorcius interned at RTW Photography, a minority-owned visual production company in Orlando, where he discovered an interest in photography. Although he doesn’t plan on pursuing a career in photography, he sees it as a potential “side hustle” down the road to supplement his income. He will graduate high school next summer and has yet to decide if he will go to college or pursue a trade.
“I have a lot of routes in mind right now,” he said.
Jorcius’ younger brother interned at Blue Swan Boulders, a rock-climbing gym in downtown Orlando.
“It was fun. They taught me new things and I learned I needed to work on time management and get there on time,” Tyquan Hall said.
Victor graduated from Jones High School this year and plans on studying international business at Valencia College in the fall on a scholarship from the Harris Rosen Foundation.
After college, he hopes to land a job in the business world and earn enough money to help support his parents so they can retire. He is grateful for all the opportunities he was able to connect with through Kidz Zone.
“With my background, having the opportunity to go to college for no cost at all is something I know that others really want,” he said. “To be in PKZ (Parramore Kidz Zone), to be honest with you, is probably the best experience anyone can truly have.”
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