The awkwardly named Surround Care program - formerly the Rochester Children's Zone - took another hit last week, when its director abruptly resigned, apparently over a conflict with some board members.

The concept of Surround Care is to take one of Rochester's poorest neighborhoods, in the northeast part of the city, and literally surround it with help - health care, social services, job training, employment - to try to counter the influences that besiege inner-city families. The neighborhood has one of the region's highest rates of unemployment, homicide, and drug use, and the schools serving its children have low test scores and high drop-out rates.

The Rochester Children's Zone was initiated by the City School District, because former Superintendent Manny Rivera recognized that the combination of those influences makes it almost impossible for children to do well in school.

Since the beginning, Surround Care has faced enormous odds. The program on which it was modeled - the Harlem Children's Zone in New York City - has received rave reviews. But in Rochester, many community leaders immediately dismissed the concept when Rivera proposed it; their animosity toward the school district is so intense that any idea emanating from it is tainted. To do the job right would take a lot of money, and when we asked some of those community leaders early on whether they would be willing to help raise money for it, their answer was a flat No.

Leaders of the program formed an independent corporation, divorced from the school district, and got a promise of $4 million from the state. But that would hardly provide the years of funding that success would demand, and nothing else has been secured. And now, after providing about $1 million of that $4 million, the state has cut that amount by at least $2 million. Whether that's because of the state's own financial problems or because somebody convinced state leaders that the program isn't worth funding may be irrelevant. The result is the same. Unless there's an angel waiting out there somewhere, the program will have to rely on volunteers. And volunteers can't possibly do the job that needs to be done.

Even after the program was cut loose from the school district, many community leaders dismissed it. It was too big, they said; its goals were too lofty, and it should have a connection to United Way. I'm sympathetic to that last point, but Surround Care leaders insisted that the community itself ought to be in charge.

This is an old Rochester argument - an old argument surrounding anti-poverty work in general. Would things have been any different if this had been created with a strong connection to the United Way, or if corporate or government leaders had set it up? Was "the community" capable of running something this complex? Was Iris Bannister the right person to lead Surround Care?

I doubt that we'll ever know. But the city desperately needs a program like Surround Care-Children's Zone. We will pay for the problems in the inner city, one way or another, either in prevention and restoration or in police, judges, jails, public defenders, unemployment, and medical bills.

We will also pay for those problems, by the way, in the loss of talent: in the loss of a skilled and educated work force that could help this region be more competitive.

At this point, I can't imagine a path that will get us to a successful Children's Zone-type program. Obviously, there isn't the community will. But it's interesting, isn't it? Many of the leaders of this community have pulled out all the stops trying to get funding for the Ren Square theater. They were down in Albany recently lobbying for $30 million more in state aid. If we get the theater, taxpayers will fund the majority of its costs.

Well, the theater would be "an economic-development engine."

Rescuing thousands of children from a life of poverty, of course, would not be.