Head Start meets big need

By Timothy Pratt

Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2008 | 2 a.m.

The schedule would have been impossible for most people, but it was set by a dedicated mother.

For two years, Arelly Meneses Pedraza cleaned offices from 4 p.m. to 3 a.m., rushed home for three hours of rest and rose at 7 to take her preschool-age daughter Karen to a Head Start program. Then she slept a few hours more before picking up Karen at noon and spending the afternoon mothering the girl and her older sister before starting the routine all over again, five days a week.

Meneses Pedraza’s husband worked 60 hours a week building houses. She worked the night shift because she had no place to leave Karen for the whole day.

Then a new group called Acelero Clark County took over Head Start, the early childhood program for poor families. Though the group works with the same $11.3 million a year the federal government gave the previous Head Start director, Acelero made budget-slashing moves such as closing an administrative building. The savings allowed Acelero to open up more full-day slots for children, going from about 200 to 416 valleywide.

One of those children was Karen. Now, Meneses Pedraza takes Karen to a Head Start center near their Las Vegas apartment at 8 a.m. and works from 8:30 to 3:30 p.m. After, she can shop or run errands. And Karen can stay at the center until 6, where she is not only learning but getting medical care and playing with other children. Best of all, the program is free.

Meneses Pedraza’s household now has what Helen Blank, leadership and public policy director for the National Women’s Law Center, calls the security and stability that comes from having a young child in a full-day Head Start program. That security and stability are possible when low-income parents can arrange the basics of day-to-day life with minimal obstacles.

Still, federal funding for the program, adjusted for inflation, hasn’t risen since 2002. In the Las Vegas Valley, despite relentless growth in the overall population and in the number of low-income families eligible for Head Start, enrollment has for years been limited to about 1,800 children.

The inability to expand the program also affects the economy of the families in the program, notes Laura Harrison, director of the valley’s Head Start program.

At the home of another child in Acelero’s full-day Head Start program, Annie Pena’s husband continues working despite the valley’s highest-since-2001 unemployment rate. But he is earning less than he did a year ago. Even after the Penas renegotiated their monthly mortgage payment down to $1,000 from $1,600, Annie had to find a job.

The full-day Head Start program allowed her to get part-time work cleaning houses, a relief with her husband dropping from a 40-hour week at an auto body shop to an odd-job schedule.

Families such as the Penas are why Harrison said: “In low-income families, you can’t talk about jobs without talking about child care.”

Harrison directed a Head Start program in St. Louis for 12 years with full-day programs for all its children. Money is the main obstacle to reaching that goal here.

Blank, who has worked on children’s issues for three decades, said that if Congress doesn’t provide more money for Head Start, the state of Nevada should. Sixteen other states already do.

Harrison said she hopes, somehow, to expand full-day slots for children to 600 next year and grow from there.

“In these times it’s even more critical,” she said.