Put Angeleno on ‘Right Track’ : Head Start Widely Hailed as Boost for Poor Children

Although his childhood memories of Project Head Start are fuzzy, Carlos de la Guerra knows it helped put him on the right track.

“When you grow up in tough neighborhoods you need someplace to go where you can express yourself, play and read with other kids and not worry about the outside world,” said De La Guerra, 27, who grew up near downtown Los Angeles.

“It was an escape for us,” added De La Guerra, who is now a criminal intelligence analyst for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office and a second-year law student at Loyola Marymount University.

9 Million Graduates

De La Guerra is just one of more than 9 million graduates of Project Head Start, the federally funded program providing early educational skills, health care and social counseling for preschool children from families at or below the poverty level.

The program is widely hailed by many liberals and conservatives alike, who say that preschool programs give disadvantaged children a desperately needed boost.

Studies clearly show that disadvantaged children benefit from Head Start and similar preschool experiences. Most experts agree that when children from similar socioeconomic backgrounds are compared, those who attend Head Start do much better than those who do not.

Study Shows Advantages

An on-going study begun in 1962 in Ypsilanti, Mich., by the High Scope Educational Research Foundation, for example, shows that children who got preschool instruction are twice as likely to graduate from high school and college and half as likely to become pregnant as teen-agers than their counterparts without preschool instruction.

Although the study was begun before Head Start, it focused on children in a preschool program nearly identical to Head Start, as well as those in a control group.

“About twice as many are employed and self-supporting,” said David Weikart, who originated the study. “In addition, the arrest rate . . . was half that” of those without preschool instruction.

“The early indication is that preschool, when done right, does impact the life of the child,” he added. Noting the social costs of illiteracy, teen-age pregnancy and joblessness, Weikart said, “Programs like Head Start could reduce the magnitude of these problems.”

When President Lyndon B. Johnson launched Head Start in 1965, it was a $128-million experiment in which 500,000 poor preschool children were enrolled in a summer program.

Last year, about $1.2 billion was spent on Head Start. The program now enrolls children for up to two years and provides medical care, nutrition and mental and psychological services. The expansion of services has outpaced the budget and--despite a huge increase in expenditures since its inception--Head Start now serves fewer children, about 452,000 this year.

Children 3 to 5 years old qualify for Head Start instruction, available on a half-day, nine-month basis in most areas. For a child in a family of four to qualify, the family’s income cannot exceed $12,100.

Local public agencies, private nonprofit groups and school systems receive grants from regional offices of the Department of Health and Human Services to operate Head Start at the community level.

Currently, the program serves fewer than 25% of the more than 2 million disadvantaged children estimated to qualify nationwide. The Los Angeles Head Start program, the third largest in the nation, enrolls about 13,869 children of 81,520 who are eligible.

The enrollment gap has brought increasing calls for a major boost to the program.