Head Start Funding

* Re: “The Unkindest Cut of All: Head Start’s Uncertain Funds,” Opinion, Aug. 6: Kay Mills paints a bleak picture for the future of Head Start. In truth, the outlook is more hopeful than she suggests.

While Head Start does face serious budget cuts, the program’s directors are actively learning to manage their resources and run their centers more efficiently and effectively. As companies and organizations everywhere are doing in the face of reduced resources. Head Start is learning to do more with less. As a result, decreased funding doesn’t have to mean serving fewer families or providing lower-quality service.

Since 1991, Head Start directors from across the nation have studied management every summer at UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management. The Head Start Johnson & Johnson Management Fellows Program, which is partially underwritten by the Johnson & Johnson Families of Companies Contribution Fund, is an intensive two-week course taught by members of Anderson’s faculty.

Through lectures, discussions, case studies and workshops, participants learn to plan, finance, lead and control the effective delivery of Head Start services, and to develop community, financial, human and organizational resources. The overall goal of the program is to develop within the directors an “entrepreneurial competence”--a bias for action, a can-do attitude.

To date, more than 280 Head Start directors have completed the Anderson School program, and the annual enrollment has doubled from 40 to 80 participants. These bright, dedicated professionals, are eager to utilize their limited resources to the greatest benefit of the families they serve, even in the face of “the unkindest cut.”

ALFRED E. OSBORNE, JR.

Faculty Director, Head Start Johnson &

Johnson Management Fellows Program

UCLA

* Head Start should be abolished. Head Start was one of the first overt attempts by government to insinuate itself into the private realm of parenting.

It is not the responsibility of government, i.e., taxpayers, to ensure that children “develop the skills and the good health [they’ll] need to succeed in school;” it is the parents’ responsibility.

If we don’t force government out of our schools, we will lose our rights, privileges and responsibilities as parents. Our children will grow up believing what Big Brother teaches them in these government-sponsored schools--that totalitarianism is good.

DENNI GONZALEZ

San Gabriel