Clinton Seeks Head Start Enhancements

The Clinton administration, struggling to bring the nation’s premier early education program for poor children into a new age of welfare reform, took new steps Tuesday to encourage those running Head Start programs to offer full-time, year-round services.

For the first time in the program’s 32-year history, the federal government has unveiled a plan to use Head Start “expansion funds”--traditionally designed to increase the number of children enrolled in the program--to expand the length and duration of some centers’ programs instead.

Using $411 million in new funds, the Department of Health and Human Services launched the program under which 50,000 Head Start pupils will spend their days in programs that provide both intensive school-readiness and traditional day care.

The latest move is part of a new ferment in the poverty program that has endured--indeed prospered--amid efforts to pare back the cost and sweep of the federal government’s social welfare programs. But while this year’s $3.4-billion funding for Head Start represents an all-time high, friends and critics of the program are demanding that it change with the times.

Since its inception, Head Start has been designed to provide at least nine months of intensive school-readiness programs to the 3- to 5-year-old children of low-income households. But now, lawmakers, governors and federal officials are asking whether the program’s structure and practices--including half-day programs, summers off and significant requirements for parental involvement--work in an age when welfare recipients are going to be required to work, sometimes full-time.

Already, the prospect of welfare reform has helped prompt an expansion of Head Start to include infants between 6 months and 3 years old; $12 million of the “expansion funds” affected by Tuesday’s announcement will go to help establish “Early Start” programs for infants.

But in recent months, the Clinton administration and many governors have urged Head Start administrators to go further, striking new partnerships with state and local child-care providers for a “seamless” program of education and day care for poor children.

Some Head Start advocates fear that the new initiative could compromise the quality and integrity of the program that now serves 750,000 low-income children, diluting its mandate to get poor children ready for school.

And among advocates, an even greater fear looms: that lawmakers and governors gripped by a zeal for local initiatives in managing poverty programs will seek to turn Head Start over to the states.

Those fears are fueled by comments from officials such as Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, an admirer of Head Start who on Tuesday told a meeting of child-care experts in Washington that program administrators have too long resisted entreaties to coordinate their teaching programs with more traditional day care programs.

“To Head Start administrators who say, ‘Don’t touch us because you’re going to pollute our program,’ I say, ‘You’re wrong,’ ” said Romer, who also is chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “Don’t put walls around yourselves so that you’re so pristine but so far from the working people.”

Romer emphasized that he does not want to see Head Start--with its funding--turned over to the states. But his remarks are often construed that way and other governors--among them Republican Gov. George V. Voinovich of Ohio--have floated the idea of “block-granting” Head Start funds to the states.