Head Start Center Faces Fiscal Probe : Education: The L.A. County audit comes at the same time that two program officers resign. They expressed frustration over problems and a possible misuse of funds.

A Los Angeles County Office of Education fiscal team will investigate allegations of improprieties by a center that runs a Head Start program serving 1,200 disadvantaged children in Los Angeles and the Antelope Valley.

The investigation announced Wednesday comes at the same time that the executive director of the Frederick Douglass Child Development Center and the chairman of its Board of Directors announced their resignations, expressing frustration over problems at the center and possible misuse of funds.

“We have to look into the allegations to determine what is going on,” said Mary Lou Hamaker, senior project director of Head Start for the Office of Education.

The Office of Education distributes federal funds to the center for Head Start instruction, meals and medical services for children at 33 locations in downtown Los Angeles, South-Central Los Angeles and the Antelope Valley. Hamaker said parents have complained about improprieties she would not discuss.

Robert Smith, who chaired the center’s Board of Directors, resigned Wednesday, saying he does not have time to devote to an agency that he said has “substantial problems.”

Board co-chair Beverly Russell said Wednesday night after the directors met with Hamaker that the board will launch its own investigation of the center’s problems. “We are aware of some allegations and we are going to investigate those allegations,” she said.

Hamaker wrote a letter to the center’s Board of Directors in 1990, threatening to suspend or terminate the center’s $3.5-million federal grant unless steps were taken to correct the problems. She demanded that the board select a permanent executive director and stop interfering in day-to-day operations of the Head Start program.

She said Wednesday that she has “some concern” that the problems have not been corrected but is not now considering suspending the grant.

After receiving Hamaker’s letter last year, the board named Ted Anderson executive director. Anderson resigned Tuesday, charging that money that Lancaster gave to the program to serve children in that city may have been spent improperly before he took office, including payments to board members to attend meetings.

In the aftermath of Anderson’s comments and based on parent complaints, Lancaster officials announced Tuesday that they are looking into how more than $20,000 contributed to the agency since 1984 has been spent.

Ludovico Ramillano, the center’s fiscal officer, said this week that a mistake was made in crediting $4,412 to an account used by the Board of Directors. The money should have been placed in an account to be used for children in Lancaster, he explained. “It was an honest mistake on our part,” he said.

Anderson also complained that the board had not heeded Hamaker’s mandate that it not interfere in day-to-day matters.