County Faces A Tough
Call On Head Start
Montgomery Panel Votes To Retain Service Level,
Not Admit More Children
By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 26, 2003; Page A01
Instead, from 7 a.m., when his parents, recent immigrants from Bolivia, drop
him off at the babysitter, to 4 p.m., when they pick him up, he watches
television. All day. Every day. "When the TV set gets too hot," he
said through an interpreter, "that's when it's time to turn it off."
Montgomery County School Superintendent Jerry D. Weast says there are at
least 1,000 children like Dorian in the county. Their parents cannot afford to
send them to private preschool. And there's not enough room for them in Head
Start, the federal program designed to prepare needy children for school and
provide their families with social, physical and psychological support.
In recent months, children like Dorian have prompted a fierce,
soul-searching debate among the county's leaders. In a year of budget
shortfalls, they say they have two choices: leave intact the $14.6 million Head
Start program and its myriad of dental, medical and social services, or cut
some of those services to make room for more children.
The arguments -- about what Head Start is and whom it should serve -- echo a
stormy national debate as the Bush administration seeks to make it more
academic, and as a rapidly growing non-English-speaking population puts
increasing strain on the 34-year-old program.
Yesterday, a County Council committee unanimously approved a recommendation
wrought after months of deliberations by a specially convened work group: leave
Head Start alone. If you dilute the services for the neediest of the needy, the
group concluded, you destroy what has made Head Start work for decades.
"Head Start is about educating the whole child," said County
Council President Michael L. Subin (D-At Large). "This is about how many
whole kids are we getting to. Not just how many bodies."
Montgomery officials are in this dilemma in part because they have always
done Head Start differently. And it has cost them vastly more. Instead of
offering the intensive services only to those who meet the federal definition
of poverty, they have long included children from families who meet the
county's much higher income standards for poverty, doubling the number of
children. All the county's Head Start teachers are certified public school
teachers, while nationally, until recently, a Head Start teacher needed just a
high school diploma.
As a result, Montgomery's program spends $8,897 a child, compared with most
programs' average of about $5,000. And although the federal government pays for
80 percent of most Head Start programs, in Montgomery it picks up 31 percent.
This year, county officials say, they simply can't stretch the dollars any
further. Even so, they agreed yesterday to look for $1 million more just to
keep the same number of needy children -- 2,363 -- in preschool next year as
this year.
"Are there kids not going to get in that should? Yes. Does that trouble
me? Hell, yes," County Council member Tom Perez (D-Silver Spring) said of
the work group's recommendation. "But Head Start has to be about more than
learning the ABCs, especially for kids in need."
On the other side of the divide is Weast. As superintendent of Maryland's
largest school system, he is struggling to respond to an influx of poor and
non-English-speaking immigrant children, at a time when the federal No Child Left
Behind law has required a high-stakes testing regime as early as third grade.
Weast points to studies that have found that when poor children,
particularly those who speak little English, have had preschool, they come to
kindergarten more on par with their middle-class peers. If the achievement gap
that separates African American and Latino children from their higher-scoring
white and Asian classmates is going to narrow, he believes, the work must begin
even before kindergarten, when 1,000 poor children show up without having had
any preschool, his own figures show.
So in October, Weast floated a plan to reduce Head Start social services and
free up money that could be used to add 1,000 children to a revamped program he
called "Fast Start." The idea was quickly and roundly rebuked, with
leaders such as Perez calling it "False Start."
"Who decides who gets saved?" Weast said last week. "I'm
willing to take the heat on the program design no one liked. But we should be
designing a program for all children, when we know they're all equally
suffering. To ignore great groups of children is morally wrong."
The recommendation to leave Head Start as is -- to serve about the same
number of children -- has unearthed tensions among some Latino and African
American leaders.
Fernando Cruz-Villalba, head of the Hispanic Alliance in Montgomery County
and a member of the county's work group, said he felt his voice was drowned out
by African American Head Start advocates for whom the program works like a
"well-oiled machine." "A lot of the kids getting nothing are
Latino," he said. "I'd rather they get something rather than nothing.
Because once they surface in kindergarten so far behind, educators tell us it's
too late."
Judy Docca, head of the county NAACP's education committee, countered:
"We have never lobbied for African American children only. We have said
Head Start children. Period."
For months, the choice was described as being between giving some children a
Cadillac or more children a Hyundai. "We want everyone to have a
Cadillac," Docca said.
But with money so tight, county leaders say the Cadillac simply is not
possible this year. And with a new state law requiring preschool for all needy
4-year-olds by 2007, they know that soon they will have to find a way to reach
those 1,000 children without sacrificing quality. They have appointed a task
force to make recommendations by the end of the year.
Complicating the debate is a new federal mandate to put seat restraints and
adult monitors on all buses that carry Head Start children. Montgomery County
estimated that it would cost $2 million to comply -- or half the $4 million it
receives from the federal government every year for the program. Fairfax County
also is in a bind. School officials there figured it would cost more to meet
the transportation requirement than they receive in federal money. Like
Montgomery, Fairfax has applied for a waiver.
Under Montgomery's current plan, the school system is retrofitting some
buses and proposing to offer Head Start next year in 23 geographically
clustered schools, half this year's number. Half as many children will be in
the 31/4-hour program as are now. The rest will be in the county's new
21/2-hour preschool program.
There will be 10 fewer full-time teachers and half as many instructional
aides. The size of all classes will increase from 17 children to 20. But many
of the hard-won social services will be the same for both groups, though there
will be fewer staff members in the county preschool program.
Still, the fate of the plan remains uncertain. "Will the federal
government really give the same amount of money for half the kids?" Weast
has asked. County leaders, as yet, have no answer.
Weast says his ill-fated Fast Start proposal became tangled in the national
debate over the future of Head Start. The Bush administration is pushing a
literacy-based curriculum and wants to move Head Start from the Department of
Health and Human Services to the Department of Education. Further, there is
talk of dismantling federal oversight and sending Head Start money to the
states in a block grant.
Longtime Head Start advocates call the moves a threat to the ideals of the
program, which grew out of the nation's civil rights struggles. Head Start was
designed to help the "whole child," they say, and help families break
the cycle of poverty. The philosophy is that children can't learn if they are
hungry or sick or under stress. Family-style lunches teach manners as well as
provide nutrition. Tiny toothbrushes line classroom sinks to teach dental hygiene,
and hygienists check teeth twice a year.
Yvonne Shack, a Montgomery County family services worker, said she is living
proof that Head Start not only teaches children but also makes families whole.
Like those of many other Head Start advocates, her story makes her intensely
loyal to the program and the idea that it should not change.
She started as a Head Start parent, became a classroom volunteer, a
teacher's aide and a van driver and now, as she completes her master's degree
in counseling, is one of 23 family services workers in Montgomery County. In a
recent week, she brought groceries to one family, referred a depressed mother
to a counselor, found a dentist to fix a child's rotten front teeth, arranged
for two free pairs of eyeglasses for two children, taught a parenting class on
loving discipline and helped another woman set goals to find an English
language class and learn to drive.
"The steps I've taken really say a lot about what Head Start is all
about," she said.
Even so, many advocates say there is room for improvement. Children in the
program are, by congressional mandate, required to recognize only 10 letters
and a handful of numbers by the end of the year.
"Some Head Start teachers thought it wasn't even appropriate to put
letters up on their walls," said Nick Zil, a researcher with Westat, one
of the companies hired by the federal government to study the program's
effectiveness. "But the pendulum is swinging back. There is a recognition
now you can have more emphasis on emergent literacy and basic skills and still
keep the whole child approach."
Still, for the coming year, with money tight and the choice of Solomon
before them, county leaders decided to keep the program closed to hundreds of
needy children -- and, by default, to let Dorian Cardenas Rios continue to
watch television all day, every day, in order to try to save children like
Nijah Webb.
On her first day in Head Start at Bel Pre Elementary in the fall, 4-year-old
Nijah cursed her teachers. She hit her classmates. When she didn't get her way,
she fell to the floor and kicked and cried. She didn't know how to open a book
by herself, but she had a large and adult vocabulary, a byproduct of watching
MTV, hanging around grown-ups and drifting from place to place with a young
mother who was trailed by three misdemeanor warrants.
Within days, a psychologist came to class to work with Nijah. Her teacher
and a family services worker came to Nijah's home. Nijah had been taken in by
her great-grandmother, Clara Webb, a 63-year-old retired federal worker who
acknowledged she "didn't know anything about anything" when it came
to raising a young child these days.
They brought a car seat and children's books. They arranged for work with a
speech pathologist. And when Clara Webb attended Head Start parent meetings,
she found a network of support.
Now, Nijah, who once bristled at a touch, hugs freely. She has been
potty-trained and no longer scribbles with abandon on the walls. She has
discovered how much she loves books. She does not disrupt her small class of
17; she is part of it.
"I think in a more typical preschool environment, Nijah might have been
misidentified as emotionally disturbed and put into special ed," said her
teacher, Diane Tunis.
Would she have made it without so many intensive services? With fragile
young lives hanging in the balance, county leaders say they are not willing to
find out.
© 2003
The Washington Post Company