Head Start Gets 6-Year Lease at Lampson

Thanks to an eleventh-hour reprieve from Head Start in San Francisco and the Orange Unified School District, 68 preschoolers will be able to learn numbers, letters and social skills next fall that will help prepare them for kindergarten.

Head Start program directors at Garden Grove’s Lampson Elementary School--where the program is called Orange Children and Parents Together--had feared the worst when they received notice last week that their lease on school district property would not be renewed when it expired Sunday.

Children in the program, who come from some of the poorest homes in the district, appeared to be the latest victims of classroom overcrowding and highly charged politics.

But the same administrators were cheering late Thursday night, when trustees on the Board of Education voted 5 to 2 to give Head Start a six-year lease at a cost of $1 per year for a parcel of the school’s extensive grounds.

“We’re just thrilled,” said Judy Markham, a children’s advocate at Lampson. “I was very pleasantly surprised.”

Head Start officials in San Francisco had agreed to give the Lampson program an emergency grant of $195,000 to buy two portable classrooms, but only if district trustees would agree to the long-term lease.

On Thursday, the trustees narrowly passed a policy that none of the district’s 37 schools could receive a portable classroom to relieve overcrowding unless every conceivable room had been cleared of nonacademic uses.

The district would be short by 81 classrooms within the next five years, said Bill Flory, director of planning and facilities.

The crisis had prompted the letter to Head Start, whose 1950s bungalow would be needed for regular classes, he explained.

Trustee Martin Jacobson voted against the lease for Head Start, citing the need to keep the land free should the district need to build a school in the future.

“I think it is a worthwhile program,” Jacobson said. “But it is not required. . . . What bothers me is we’ve been talking about the district growing. Tying ourselves into a six-year lease is not exciting.”

But Trustee Rick Ledesma, who voted for the program, advised him not to think in terms of the lease.

“It is six years of preparing kids of preschool age for kindergarten,” he said.