For 25 years, North Lawndale’s three- and four-year-olds have learned their ABCs at Howland Elementary, a public school at 1616 S. Spaulding. The preschool classes they took were part of the federally funded Headstart program, one of the few Great Society initiatives to survive nearly 20 years of mostly Republican rule. But come September there won’t be any sing-alongs, story times, or field trips for the children of North Lawndale. Headstart at Howland–as well as at 42 other public schools–has been eliminated, and local activists don’t even have Ronald Reagan to blame.
“They took Headstart out of Howland, but so far they haven’t replaced it with another preschool program for the community,” says Josephine Anderson, a veteran teacher at Howland. “Our kids need Headstart to compete. It tears at my soul to think that the city is going to let them fall behind.”
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The irony is that Headstart is one of the few programs for which the public schools receive fairly wide praise. It’s based on the supposition that low-income kids need the same sort of preschool preparation that children from wealthier families pay good money to obtain. Enrollment is limited to the poor; tuition is free. And by most objective measures, the quality is high: classrooms are supervised by at least one teacher and two teacher’s aides, and parental involvement is required. Studies show that children who enroll in Headstart will eventually perform better academically than their peers who don’t.
The problem, according to the feds, is teachers’ pay. The average public-school Headstart teacher receives about $45,000; in contrast, Headstart teachers in other programs make roughly $15,000. The feds warned the city that if the public-school salary differences weren’t reduced, all Headstart funding would be lost.
Part of their anger had to do with the fact that none of them had been warned of the pending transfers. Despite all the rhetoric about local control and empowerment, it was yet another decision being made by central-office power brokers. In addition, they worried that the new Headstart sites would be hastily selected and poorly operated.
“It didn’t make sense to close Headstart,” says board member Patricia Daley. “It wasn’t going to cost much more than a few hundred thousand dollars to keep it. We weren’t going to fire the Headstart teachers; they would have been transferred to other jobs in the system. We felt the money for Headstart could be found somewhere in the budget.”
Beyond that, Daley wants to use Headstart “as a source of patronage to reward all those black preachers who supported him in the last election,” says Deanes. “You watch and see how many black churches get those Headstart contracts.” Kimbrough goes along with this plan because he’s Daley’s puppet, Deanes argues.
