Across the River : Saving America's Inner Cities / Hedrick Smith Productions.

Hope is not what most Americans associate with the nation’s inner cities, but this program, with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith, offers a rare series of powerful and encouraging portraits of urban heroes who are reviving once-dying neighborhoods. Filmed in Washington, D.C., the program offers an almost unknown face of the inner city—one that contrasts sharply with the typical images of crime, drugs, and violence seen on the nightly news. The program features five different aspects of inner city development: a group of former drug users and criminals, who are now reaching out to juvenile offenders and fathers in prison, to show them how a life of drugs and crime is a dead-end; two school programs that use mentors and extensive job internships to achieve a graduation rate of 94% in an area where a 40% drop-out rate is the norm; a public housing project that is rehabilitating its tenants, not its buildings; a successful effort to attract the middle class back to an inner city area that was decimated during the crack epidemic of the 1980s; and an economic program that has led to the redevelopment of a shopping area, opening up new businesses, creating the services and jobs that anchor a community. (57 minutes)

9 - 12, Academic/AP

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