Head Start Losing Its Site--but Who’s Losing Sight?

It’s not as though anyone in Yorba Linda is saying to Head Start: Get out of town.

But Head Start, which now serves 88 preschoolers on an elementary school site, is getting out of town June 30 when its five-year lease ends.

Though city and school district officials want to help find the preschool program a new home, no one can guarantee that it will happen.

Does that sound right?

Does it sound right that Yorba Linda, a once-sleepy burg that continues to emerge and now sports a median home price 20% above the countywide average, has no room for the Head Start portable facility that’s been parked outside Mabel Paine Elementary School for the past five years?

It is left to Head Start supervisor Marlene Mitchell to lament, “We have a home, but no place to go.”

Its “home” is the multiroom modular facility that provides the wide range of preschool activities that most people agree is instrumental in helping low-income youngsters prepare for kindergarten. The modular can move if someone can find a place for it to go.

For the last five years, the Placentia-Yorba Linda School District has let Head Start operate at Mabel Paine for $1 a year. But with a new housing development imminent in the hills behind the school, the district needs extra space on the Mabel Paine site, and that means the Head Start modular must go.

School district administrator Kim Stallings says the district isn’t happy about ending the lease. “We’ve been very supportive of Head Start,” Stallings says. “That was demonstrated when we donated property to them for five years. Our problem is that big housing development. Our deal with that development is that we will build a school but not until they’ve built quite a few homes. The first few hundred kids, we’ve got no place to put them. We always planned to put them here [at Mabel Paine]. We told Head Start that for a long time.”

If so, there’s been a communications gap, for Mitchell and new Head Start Executive Director Neil Yoneji (who took over in December) say they first heard in January that the lease wouldn’t be renewed and that no other site existed in Yorba Linda.

Mitchell acknowledges that, far from turning a cold shoulder, both city and school officials vowed to help with relocation. But Mitchell and Yoneji are worried that some of Yorba Linda’s poor families may not be able to get their children to other locations.

Yorba Linda is a quintessential middle- and upper-middle-class community. Mitchell, however, talks about the “pockets of poverty” that are largely hidden from most Yorba Lindans.

Pat Haley, Yorba Linda’s community development director, says the city will try to free up some funds or encourage developers to chip in.

I ask Haley if the city feels a responsibility to Head Start.

“There’s not a legal responsibility,” she says. “Perhaps some sort of moral responsibility. We do have some children who are Yorba Linda residents. We serve them, and we might be able to help them with transportation.”

Head Start, which operates 41 centers in Orange County, doesn’t want to squabble with Yorba Linda. Because most of the 88 youngsters at its Yorba Linda site live in neighboring towns, a relocation would ease travel problems for other families.

But the lingering issue, and the one Head Start officials realize they can’t win these days, is that virtually every town has eligible youngsters. They also realize that parental involvement diminishes when they have to transport their children to other cities.

What makes that maddening, Yoneji says, is that Head Start is empowering for youngsters and that it pays back every community in which it exists.

In a perfect world, he says, every Head Start child would walk to a neighborhood center.

In a perfect world--where upscale development doesn’t force Head Start out of town--we’d all make that happen.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.