Head Start Asked to Serve Too Many Functions, Some Officials Say : Education: Bush Administration wants program to deal with family issues such as substance abuse and literacy. Critics say focus must stay on nourishing minds and bodies of preschool children.

Eating balanced meals, singing songs and learning colors, the alphabet and numbers are part of the routine at Head Start programs across the nation.

Some local programs add a bit more, such as the hands-on science and mathematics taught in Margaret Young’s classroom at Beall Elementary School in Rockville, Md.

But the Bush Administration wants the program to go beyond preparing poverty-stricken youngsters for school. It views Head Start as a vehicle for addressing the problems facing urban families--illiteracy, drugs and alcohol abuse, unemployment, teen-age pregnancy, homelessness and violence.

“The strength of Head Start has always been in the fact that it fused the child within the context of a family, the whole family,” said Wade Horn, the senior federal administrator for Head Start. “If we are to deal with the child effectively, we’re going to have to deal with the child’s parents.”

Head Start officials are skeptical. “The policy-makers are putting too much on us,” said Arvern Moore, who oversees 17 Head Start programs serving 1,980 children in nine impoverished counties in Mississippi.”

“Head Start is successful now,” added Moore, executive director of the Institute of Community Services in Holly Springs. “What they want to do is layer a lot of other kinds of issues on Head Start.”

Head Start began as a $96.4-million, eight-week summer experiment in using child development services for 561,000 low-income children. But President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty program quickly grew into today’s $2.2-billion program with 622,000 disadvantaged, American Indian and migrant youngsters in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. territories.

In 27 years, the program has served more than 12.5 million preschoolers 3 to 5 years old. Parents of these children make up 36% of the Head Start staff and about 50% of the local policy-making councils.

The program is administered locally by community-based nonprofit organizations and school systems. Federal grants cover 80% of the costs; the community must provide the other 20% in cash or services.

At least 90% of the children must live below the poverty line. To qualify, for example, a family of four may have a gross annual income of no more than $13,950.

While the emphasis is on health screening, providing nutritious meals and preparation for kindergarten, local programs offer their own extras.

Take Young’s requirement that her 15 afternoon students brush their teeth after carefully discarding trash and putting away their lunch trays.

Teacher Juanita Robinson at Bell Mill School in Potomac, Md., has a special area with dress-up clothing for the children to play in during their free time.

In both classrooms, the students sit in ragged circles and play “MathStart Bingo,” count with beads, use magnets to pick up objects and conduct other experiments.

Both teachers have added preschool science and mathematics to their curriculum as part of a Hands-On Science Outreach program operated by a local nonprofit group and paid for by the Montgomery County school board.

Joel Sanchez excitedly tells a visitor to Young’s room about the metamorphosis of butterflies. “The cocoon,” he says, pointing to a weblike mass hanging from the top of a makeshift aquarium. He left a trail of smudged fingerprints as he followed the mass to the butterflies’ new home on a plant at the end of the box.

Robinson, who had a hard time holding children’s attention after a long weekend holiday, says today’s Head Start children have very short attention spans and tend to not follow directions compared with those she has taught over the past 16 years. She blames parents who allow their children to watch television for long periods of time.

That is just part of the problem the Bush Administration wants to address.

President Bush won praise this year when he proposed a $600-million increase in Head Start funding for fiscal year 1993 to provide more seed money for trial programs and to add 157,000 more needy youngsters to the rolls.

The Administration envisions Head Start providing counseling or referrals to parents who have drug or alcohol problems, are homeless, unemployed or cannot read, or who face myriad other problems associated with urban poverty.

“If the child’s parents have a substance abuse problem, we have to deal with that,” said Horn, the Head Start administrator. “If they are illiterate, we need to deal with that. If they lack job skills, we have to deal with that because, after all, the child will live in the context of that family for a far longer period of time than they will live in the Head Start context.”

Head Start launched parent-child centers in 1967 to help pregnant women and new mothers, and last year 32 community groups received grants totaling $18 million to develop transitional programs to help Head Start graduates entering elementary school.

The Transition Projects were developed partly in answer to critics who contend there is little evidence that Project Head Start has made any long-term difference for the children it is supposed to help. A Department of Education national sampling of 1,169 kindergarten classes in 830 school districts found that most schools are not prepared to help young children make the transition to kindergarten.

But the most controversial projects fall under the heading of family support. About $6.2 million has been provided for trial programs on substance abuse, illiteracy and job training through welfare and the Job Training Partnership Act. The programs operate at 41 Head Start locations, and Horn suggests that 15 to 20 more might be added by the end of September.

Some Head Start centers operate drug rehabilitation programs.

“I don’t want my program ever to become a drug treatment center,” said Moore, president of the National Head Start Assn. “That has to go somewhere else. Referral? Yes. But we just can’t accept all these problems in terms of actually meeting their needs. I think that will detract too much from what we’re really all about.”

“They are giving you so much to do, you can’t really concentrate on doing anything well,” said Cecile Dickey of Concerned Parents for Head Start in Paterson, N.J.

Dickey has her fingers in everything--traditional Head Start child care, building homes for needy residents, linking families with substance abuse problems to drug and alcohol treatment programs, and developing an AIDS curriculum.

The Head Start board of directors in Paterson set up a separate corporation to handle the housing with two not-for-profit groups created for oversight--Concerned Parents of Head Start and Concerned Parents of Better Housing.

“We are stretching our personnel to the limit to meet the initiatives,” Dickey said.

But testimonials ring out for Head Start.

Violease Cunningham, a high school dropout and mother of five from Merced, Calif., says the program helped her shy 4-year-old daughter, Donease, blossom into a bright, energetic girl. Her 6-year-old daughter, Donella, is a graduate of Head Start and she has signed up her 3-year-old Aaron to begin the program this fall.

“It’s a Head Start family affair” for Nelle Watson of Levelland, Tex., whose four children went through the program. Over the years, Watson worked in virtually every position--volunteer, teacher assistant, teacher, parent involvement coordinator, social service coordinator, office assistant and assistant director.

Today, Watson is director of South Plains Head Start, and recently a Head Start center in a nearby community was named after her deceased husband because of his dedicated work in the program.

Clarence Everett Billups of Waycross, Ga., says his nine Head Start centers, operated by Concerted Service Inc., have had successes, especially the “intergenerational programs.” He says the 800 youngsters and 127 staff members are actively involved with the senior citizens in the area.

“I think it helped me get ready for school,” said Lisa McGrady, now an account supervisor with Ogilvy Adams & Rinehart, a public relations firm in the District of Columbia. “Part of it was a social thing, where I got used to working with other kids and kind of a more structured environment than out playing on the farm.”

McGrady said she attended Head Start in southwest Virginia until her family moved to the more affluent northern part of the state. “I think I would have been overwhelmed, especially with the cultural differences,” she said. “It gave me a lot more confidence going to school.”