By Samuel Strait, Reporter at Large – October 15, 2021 The recent acceptance of a $30 million grant from the United States Department of Education is a leftist, liberal, progressive wet dream. Promising all sorts of unrealistic outcomes for "children from distressed areas", five years at $6 million for each year to allow "non profits, including faith based groups, institutions of higher learning, and Native American tribes to be able to fund their indoctrination of children from the time they are born to the day they die. Let's just do away with any undue influence by those pesky parents who may wish to be included in their child's life. Thirty million more dollars to fund progressive and leftist causes in the local community. Will wonders never cease. It is not as if this generous outlay of taxpayer dollars has had any impact on improving lives where it has operated over the last ten plus years. It is not like this Obama era bit of social engineering was meant to improve anyone's existence, and surprise, surprise, there is not much evidence that it has. As so many of the programs that come out of the federal government, good intentions rarely have achieved the result warranting the expenditure of the money spent, this is but a repeating narrative. The Promise Neighborhood Program is one of the many thoughtless programs spawned out of the US Department of Education that has run unchecked for years without any attempt to determine whether the money was well spent. Locally we have the Yurok Tribe, True North, the Del Norte County Office of Education, the Del Norte Unified School District, the North Coast Indian Development Council, First Five, and a half dozen other local hand out organizations all salivating over the split of the money. Other than a lot of direct invasion of parental responsibilities, it is hard to envision a more blatant attempt to use tax payer dollars to further the cause of left leaning organizations in this County. As per usual all the usual suspects are in line with their respective hands out for funding with no clear cut direction or plan. We will have to implement the plan before we know what is in it. Sounds like a typical federal level accident waiting to happen. Maybe even some money in there somewhere for vacations to Japan? The first clear issue with the grant is that it terminates after five years, then what happens to the programs meant to assist children into their twenties? How do you collect data to determine if the program is working? How do you determine if the money is spent wisely and appropriately? Does anyone evaluate the program or audit the spending? How is the money shared between all the groups who are participating? How is it determined who receives the assistance? What form does the assistance come in? How do you determine what constitutes a "neighborhood"? Let's face it, for a program that has been in existence for eleven years, without any oversight or evaluation by the federal government surely some of these and many other questions about the program should have been addressed. But no, the federal government continues to churn out grants without any evidence that the program works, or that it is not doing more harm than good. Early evaluation of the programs offered in Promise Neighborhoods showed "no compelling evidence that investments in parenting classes, health services, nutritional programs, counseling, and community improvement have had appreciable effects on student achievement". In the intervening years, all the word salad about the program has yet to yield any evidence that millions of dollars invested in the program has resulted in any changes within the "Promise Neighborhoods". On the other hand one wonders what damage the various programs have done under the umbrella of being "beneficial". Buyer Beware…….