Too big. Too broad.

That was Mayor Bob Duffy's assessment when I asked him recently about the Children's Zone.

Duffy said he supports the Children's Zone concept. He has met Geoffrey Canada, whose Harlem Children's Zone is Rochester's model. He has visited Canada's program, and he thinks it's terrific.

But the local incarnation is too big, he said.

Duffy isn't the only person who has given me that critique. And indeed, the Rochester Children's Zone is a little hard to wrap your mind around. The idea is to focus intense community resources on one section of the community - generally the 14621 area of northeast Rochester - where poverty, crime, and joblessness are high.

In the Children's Zone plan, health-care, education, job-training, child-care, and other services would work together to help residents stabilize and rebuild their neighborhood.

The Children's Zone is being established by an independent non-profit organization, but it's the vision of former Rochester Schools Superintendent Manny Rivera, and that's telling. Rivera, like many of us, is convinced that the academic problems many Rochester children face are linked to the problems of their families and their community.

Planning for the Children's Zone has taken place in the neighborhood where it is to operate. Residents have spent hundreds of hours drafting goals that include reducing violence, creating living-wage jobs, mentoring parents, putting the most highly skilled teachers in the schools with the neediest children, creating more affordable housing, and reducing the level of asthma, HIV, and diabetes.

New York State has promised $4 million in funding, and late last week, Children's Zone leaders were preparing to announce the arrival of the first $750,000 of that money. They're searching for a permanent director.

The problems the Children's Zone would tackle are immense. And to be successful, on the scale that Children's Zone leaders hope, will require a broad, strong community effort. Bob Duffy and others insist that it would be better to start smaller, much smaller: select one school, maybe, and focus resources on its children and their families.

But that misses the point. We won't make headway in the fight for the survival of Rochester's poorest, most troubled neighborhoods by nibbling at the problems. (Bob Duffy isn't tackling violence by focusing the efforts of the RPD on a couple of blocks.)

Last week Rob Brown, a former Rochester School Board member who now serves on the Children's Zone board, was talking about the employment potential in Rochester's growing health-care and education areas: entry-level jobs that don't require a college degree but that pay a decent wage. He talked about the possibility of establishing a program similar to Drug Court, which would take people convicted of minor offenses and help them find jobs rather than sending them to jail.

I brought up the criticism that the Children's Zone goals are too lofty. "The idea that everybody should have a decent job: that's too grandiose?" he countered. "I think not."

The extent of the problem demands a big response, said Brown. "If the problem weren't truly massive," he said, "we would have solved it."

There's something to be said for not thinking too big. But there are also times when big problems demand big vision and big action. Nothing we've tried in the past has had a major impact.

Rochester's inner-city neighborhoods are in crisis. The violence and low graduation rates are symptoms of much deeper problems, and those problems won't go away without a major community effort.

The time for small steps is past. And the Children's Zone is the only thing I've seen in a long time that makes sense.

"We are a city littered with plans," Duffy told me. The problem, he said, is "no follow-up."

Right you are. If I were mayor, I'd help push the Children's Zone follow-up.