Fed official told of need for services

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Thursday, April 8, 2004 | 9:44 a.m.

Apparently afraid that they would lose valuable services such as early childhood education, an auditorium of about 150 people -- as many as a third of whom were Economic Opportunity Board employees -- told a federal official investigating the nonprofit agency Wednesday night how much those services meant to them.

"EOB ... helped me out and came through for me when I needed it," said Davida Colquitt, whose 5-year-old daughter, Jahnisha, goes to the Spring Valley Head Start center.

Colquitt echoed about at least a dozen others who spoke during the nearly two-hour meeting, organized by Windy Hill, associate commissioner for the Head Start bureau in Washington. Hill is leading a team looking into the agency's finances and management after the bureau gave the EOB three consecutive negative reviews dating back to 1997.

Those reviews and the agency's recent troubles -- including the $2.1 million in unaccounted-for funds from the child care assistance program, the Head Start reviews, and unanswered questions about agency credit cards and property -- weren't what most of the attendees wanted to talk about.

Instead, parents and other community members spoke about the difficulties of juggling jobs, bills and children -- and the importance of the mostly publicly funded programs the EOB runs.

Colquitt said she came to the meeting at the Nevada Partners auditorium on 701 W. Lake Mead because other parents at the Head Start center her daughter attends told her the program might shut down.

Charles Baker, policy council member for the Saratoga Palms Head Start program, said, "EOB is not just a business ... it is a cornerstone of the community."

At one point, Pamela Henry, chairwoman of the Head Start policy council, asked who in the room worked at the agency. Dozens stood up.

At the close of the meeting, state Sen. Joe Neal, D-North Las Vegas, a board member who has served as spokesman for the agency in recent weeks, said, "Nobody has absconded with any money -- irrespective of what you read in the Review-Journal and the Sun.

"If you take money -- especially federal money -- you('re) gonna go to jail. And I'm too old to go to jail."

Then he said to Hill, "I hope you've been listening."

"Don't take Head Start and child care and pack it up in a suitcase and take in back to Washington and redistribute it to someone else," he said.

Of course, Washington can't and doesn't "pack (Head Start) ... up in a suitcase," Hill explained. But her review could result in the EOB's management of the program being declared "deficient," a federal term that starts a clock ticking and could land the program in another agency's hands if certain problems aren't corrected.

Hill didn't explain all that. But she did tell the crowd, "By no means should you have any anxiety that there won't be a Head Start in your community ... that's never been an option.

"But we do have a responsibility -- because many of you are taxpayers -- to make sure that services are provided according to the policies and guidelines of federal funding agencies and EOB's own guidelines."

Hill's team will finish their work today and issue a report of its findings within a month.

Clark County Commissioner Yvonne Atkinson Gates, whose district includes many of the programs EOB runs, said at the close of the meeting, "I don't know where things will go from here.

"My main concern is that they don't lose the services."