Fast Start for Head Start

A white flag bearing the outlines of two children's playing blocks and the words HEAD START flutters from the flagstaffs of city halls and schools in 2,350 U.S. communities this week, symbolizing the new U.S. consensus that preschool school for culturally backward children is the nation's most urgent educational need. Idealistic and hastily organized, Project Head Start will reach 560,000 children and their parents, involve some 500,000 volunteers, cost the Federal Government about $85 million.

In eight weeks this summer, Head Start will try to make some headway against the sad fact that too many children are not emotionally, psychologically or physically ready to bridge the gap between crowded, repressive homes, where they are told to shut up, and the public school, where they are asked to open up and learn. The project puts kids of four, five, and six into "child development centers," where under close personal attention they will be encouraged by simple successes to avoid the spiral of failure that often starts with school's first day. They will have physical examinations, dental care, free meals. Their parents will be counseled at home, urged to help the kids by such easy steps as reading to them and telling them stories.

The Value of Words. "The greatest difficulty these children have is in language," explains Dr. Robert E. Cooke, chief pediatrician at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and one of the key Head Start planners. "Other children are taken into laps, held, read to and shown pictures. At first they don't get much--only emotional value. The deprived child, without this exposure, never gets the emotional reassurance of the words and pictures."

Head Start is part of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty, run by Sargent Shriver's Office of Economic Opportunity. It is directed by ten professionals, headed by Dr. Julius B. Richmond, dean of New York's State University Upstate Medical Center faculty and a lifelong researcher in effects of deprivation on children. Most communities were given a mere six weeks to work out their local plans to qualify for the 90% share of federal money.

Shriver's staff anticipated programs for 100,000 children in 300 communities at a cost of $17 million, was startled --and pleased--by a response nearly six times greater. More than half of the cooperating communities are in Southern and border states. A high proportion of the children are Negro; conforming to the Civil Rights Act's Title VI, the whole project, North and South, is integrated. Federal costs average $170 per child.

"Silently as a Doe." Washington urges the centers to limit their classes to 15 children. Each class has a professional teacher, a teacher's assistant and a nonprofessional volunteer aide, preferably a poor person familiar with the children's environment.

Some 37,000 teachers have attended six-day crash training courses at 118 colleges to prepare for their classes, which usually resemble kindergartens with a touch of the Montessori method. In a course at George Washington University last week, teachers got such tips as: "Four-year-olds are motor oriented completely. They never walk if they can run. You are expected to have four hands, three laps, eyes in the back of your heads, to be able to run swiftly as a deer and silently as a doe." A pamphlet on volunteers warns project directors to beware of taking on "Lady Bountiful, with her thinly veiled condescension."

The medical benefits may turn out to be just as valuable as the educational. Washington estimates that 110,000 children will be found to need glasses and will get them; 50,000 partially deaf children will be spotted; 75,000 will need basic shots; 25,000 will be suffering from severe malnutrition. New York City expects to give each of the 26,000 children at 333 centers in its $5.6 million project a 40-minute comprehensive physical exam, 1 1/2 hours of dental examination and treatment.

Polly Pointer & Molly Middle. Head Start classes began in Atlanta last week with 1,800 children on opening day. Instead of a dropout problem, favorable reaction caused the number to grow during the week. Children who had never used a fork sat at tables for a break fast of eggs, grits, hot biscuits, tomato juice and milk, and lunches of meat, potatoes, vegetable, corn bread, dessert and milk.

In the grimly industrial town of East Chicago, Ind., one class of 15 well-scrubbed children sat in the modernistic cleanliness of Carrie Gosch School to cry a little, fight back their shyness when asked to recall the name of the pupil next to them, giggle over the names Teacher Eugie Gillis assigned to her fingers: "Tommy Thumb, Polly Pointer, Molly Middle, Robbie Ring and Baby Finger." One child, asked what he had learned the first week, replied proudly: "Not to pick my nose." Explained Supervisor Thomas McKenna: "It might be banal, but for the child it was a big thing."

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