A slow start for reform

By Timothy Pratt

Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2006 | 8:15 a.m.

A year after the federal government announced that the Las Vegas Valley's Head Start program needed to be put in new hands, the issue seems to have advanced little beyond piles of legal papers building up here and in Washington.

The Head Start bureau announced in January 2005 that the Economic Opportunity Board should not be running the $12.2 million program that serves about 1,800 children from poor families in the valley. The idea was to take the program away from the EOB -- which had received negative reviews in 1997 and 2003 -- and bid it out to other organizations.

The reviews pointed to problems with the EOB's use of funds, parent participation, health care and other issues. The organization also ran into problems with its other programs, eventually losing most of a $20 million child care contract.

But a month after the federal government's decision was announced, the EOB appealed, putting the process in the hands of another wing of the federal bureaucracy: The Departmental Appeals Board, a branch of the Health and Human Services Department.

What is it and what has it been doing during the last year? And when might there finally be a resolution?

Cecilia Ford, chairwoman of the appeals board, described in a phone call from Washington the back-and-forth among the EOB -- the valley's largest nonprofit organization -- the Head Start bureau and her agency.

In February the EOB filed a motion for summary disposition -- meaning it wanted the board to decide in its favor without first having a face-to-face hearing.

The Head Start bureau's parent agency, the Administration for Children and Families, took until April 15 to submit additional paperwork. The agency also filed a motion to dismiss the EOB's appeal.

By the end of April, both parties asked to have until June to supply more documents "because of the unusual complexity of this matter," according to the joint motion.

In June both parties asked for a change in the schedule proposed in April, partly because "changes in key personnel" on both sides made it difficult to supply documents. The EOB has changed executive directors four times in the last two years.

The paper-gathering process stretched out until the end of July. In a telephone conference the following month, both the EOB's motion to rule in its favor without a hearing and the federal government's motion to dismiss the appeal were denied.

The process dragged on, including a Nov. 15 motion by the federal government to rule in its favor without a hearing. But in December, the EOB asked for and got more time to produce paperwork -- until Jan. 10 -- in response to the federal government's motion.

The next event in the saga will be Friday, when federal officials reply to the EOB's most recent pile of paper.

According to Ford, during the last decade, the appeals board has handled 41 appeals of federal decisions to terminate Head Start programs or suspend their funding.

Twenty-two were settled or abandoned without the board making a decision. Of the remaining 19 appeals, all but three produced rulings in favor of the federal government and against the Head Start program.

On average, those decisions took about 345 days to reach -- just about where the Las Vegas case is at now.

Bill Hall, spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department, said it is impossible to predict how long it will take for the board to reach its decision, which will be made by a panel of three members, all of whom are attorneys.

Meanwhile, the other side of the federal government -- the one that made the decision to take Head Start away from the EOB -- had investigators visit Las Vegas last week to examine the delivery of health care services to children in the program.

"In a perfect world," Hall said, "we would want to resolve these (appeals) as fast as possible -- because real people are affected."

Timothy Pratt can be reached at 259-8828 or at timothy@lasvegassun.com.