OAKLAND — In an effort to continue work on former President Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper program, Mayor Libby Schaaf has hired Ricardo Huerta Niño as the city’s first director of collective impact.

My Brother’s Keeper “is President Obama’s legacy project,” Huerta Niño said on the last full day of the 44th president’s tenure.

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East Bay college professors take courses to learn how to teach online It is directed at young men of color, intended to ease their path through school into the workforce and keep them clear of the criminal justice system.

Oakland has been a pilot city for the program, which will continue as a nonprofit organization. It is already at work in 200 cities.

Huerta Niño has his work cut out for him, since Oakland has a high school graduation rate of only 67 percent.

Only 34 percent of Latino students in second through fifth grades read at grade level, compared with 85 percent of white students, according to a preliminary report from the Oakland My Brother’s Keeper.

And only 47 percent of Asian youth entering schools have early literacy skills, whereas 75 percent of white students do.

Although African-American students make up 27 percent of the enrollment in Oakland, 40 percent of them are in special education, the report continued.

Huerta Niño earned his doctorate at UC Berkeley and returned there as a lecturer in city and regional planning. Most recently, he was director of planning and strategic partnerships at the community development corporation Unity Council in the Fruitvale District.

He will be paid $95,000 plus benefits annually.

To a great extent, his work will be to bring together efforts already underway to better help Oakland’s children on the path to success, he said in an interview.

“We are really just building on the longstanding and nationally recognized work of Oakland organizations and agencies,” he wrote in a followup email.

“They really need to get more credit and appreciation for the thousands of youth they are helping to stay on a healthy and positive path, and for all that means in terms of the impact on the families, neighborhoods and the city,” Huerta Niño wrote.

He cited programs such as the school district’s African American Male Achievement Initiative, the Youth Ventures joint powers authority, Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice and Youth Uprising.

A July job fair My Brother’s Keeper placed landed more than 300 Oakland youngsters in full-time, permanent jobs.

Oakland is one of just six cities in the country chosen for Harvard Graduate School of Education’s By All Means project, which targets eliminating links between children’s socioeconomic status and achievement, Huerta Niño said.

Harvard mentioned Schaaf’s Oakland Promise program, intended to triple in 10 years the number of Oakland students graduating from college, as a motivating factor in choosing the city for its work.

Oakland Promise has drawn $25 million in donations for things such as tuition funds for high school students who cannot afford to go and college savings accounts for kindergartners.

“We are fortunate to have the leadership of a range of nationally recognized nonprofit organizations, progressive philanthropic foundations and elected officials, all of which offer Oakland the opportunity to be more effective in our work,” Huerta Niño said.

He cited the mayor’s commitment to collaborate with school leaders, the private sector and nonprofits.

Huerta Niño will be targeting six areas: school readiness, attaining reading skills, graduating high school, attending college, landing jobs and finding a way back into society after a brush with the law.

In Oakland, 45 percent of African-American students are deemed ready for school on the first day of preschool, a number that grows to 76 percent at year’s end. But their Asian, Latino and white peers, who posted similar or worse numbers at the beginning of the year, go up to 84 to 88 percent by year’s end, My Brother’s Keeper has found.

Monitoring student attendance and health provides key indicators of where help is needed, Huerta Niño said. Already, Oakland Starting Smart, a collaboration of donors such as the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation and East Bay Community Foundation and agencies including First 5 Alameda County and the Oakland Literacy Coalition and advocates are at work on this and other milestones on Huerta Niño’s agenda.

Regarding reading at grade level by third grade, African-American boys lag behind girls, 31.8 percent to 40.5 percent. But they outpace Latino boys, 25.5 percent, and girls, 31.4 percent.

Asian boys are at 51.1 percent grade-level by third grade and girls at 58.5 percent, but white boys hit 74.3 percent and white girls 83.1 percent.

The Oakland Literacy Coalition, through its Oakland Reads 2020, is working on improving reading proficiency along with the school district’s Elementary Literacy Collaborative.

Besides coordinating efforts addressing the milestone targets, Oakland’s new director of collective impact also will be accumulating “top-notch” data.

“If you feed it back to the school you can have a real impact, right away,” he said.

Contact Mark Hedin at 510-293-2452, 408-759-2132 or mhedin@bayareanewsgroup.com.