Did Agency Renege on Promise To Work with Head Start Parents?

  • Yolanda Gonzalez, Acting Director of the Community Action Partnership?s Head Start program, explains to skeptical parents how the decision was made to close the program here. In back (standing) Anne Weber, Coordinator or the Family Resource Center, listens. In front parents David Evans and Charlotte Deese consider their options.

    Yolanda Gonzalez, Acting Director of the Community Action Partnership?s Head Start program, explains to skeptical parents how the decision was made to close the program here. In back (standing) Anne Weber, Coordinator or the Family Resource Center, listens. In front parents David Evans and Charlotte Deese consider their options.

‘Mountain Children’s Funds Sent to Bakersfield’ Mom Says

By Patric Hedlund

Parents of Head Start students are asking whether the Community Action Partnership of Kern, based in Bakersfield, has reneged on its public agreement to work with them to try to keep the doors open for the classroom-based Head Start program here.

On February 1 Yolanda Gonzalez, Director of Education for the program, met about ten parents, two reporters and a television camera in the Head Start classroom at Frazier Park School. She explained there were three reasons she had decided to terminate the Mountain Communities classroom program: Difficult commutes for the teachers who lived in Bakersfield; Lack of a bathroom within the facility leased from Frazier Park School; and need for assurance that there would be sufficient qualified children to attend the program next year. Gonzalez said the agency intends to continue the home-based Head Start component offered by teacher Anita Anderson.

When parents Paul Luna, David Evans, Charlotte Deese and others said they would help recruit both qualified students and local teachers with Early Childhood Education credentials she said she would work with them. Gonzalez said she was stunned by how active the parents were willing to be.

"I’m new, and I guess I didn’t know this community," she said at the time.

Since February 1, two applications have been submitted and children have been referred. Parents have been busily recruiting, but after less than two months they were again told the program would close.

Gonzalez again said she plans to close down the classroom program here, retaining only the home-based component, even though she will be paying about $10,000 to retain the lease for the classroom at Frazier Park School. She said the room would be used twice a month for one- to three-hour "socialization" sessions for the home-base students. She also said the home-base teacher, (currently working out of the Family Resource Center) would make her office there. She said "I would need 30 qualified students (two sessions a day) for the Frazier Mountain program to be cost effective for me." The current program serves 15 students.

Commenting on the ‘moving goal posts,’ parent Charlotte Deese said "they are taking our money and moving it to Bakersfield." Gonzalez said KCAP’s program "is funded for 2,348 children; we don’t have a specific amount per site," adding it is hard to recruit teachers for only a half-day of work. She said other sites typically have 40 children. She said 20 children could be acceptable here, if she could find two fully credentialed ECE teachers and an aide with 12 units of Early Childhood training. She added that the two applications submitted did not qualify.

Parents are writing letters to state and federal legislators.

This is part of the April 04, 2008 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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