NEW HEAD START PROGRAM HERE WILL SHUT DOWN

A free, full-day preschool program offered to low-income families by the Cape Girardeau branch of East Missouri Action Agency has been canceled because of lack of participation.

Parents arriving at EMAA, 1111 Linden, Thursday morning were told the full-day Head Start program would be shut down indefinitely after today and they would have to make other child-care arrangements for the summer. Parents earlier had been informed the program would be closed only for the first week of July.

Cape Girardeau staff members referred questions regarding the closure to EMAA headquarters in Park Hills, Mo. Renee Killian, director of Head Start programs throughout EMAA's eight-county service area, said she made the decision to end the program because it has operated in a deficit for two years and its enrollment has declined to about three children daily.

"I don't know what's going on down there that's causing the lack of involvement," said Killian. "We talked to staff and instructed them to try and find more children. They haven't been able to do so, and I made the decision we would not be able to operate the program."

In 1997, the Cape Girardeau Head Start program became one of a handful across the nation to provide two separate programs. The half-day program provides students with an education, healthy meals and snacks, and indoor-outdoor play time. A second program provides the same opportunities but is a full-day, year-round program for children whose parents work or are enrolled in job-training or school programs.

Head Start is a federally funded program that provides health, nutritional, social and educational services to 3- to-5-year-olds from mainly low-income homes.

Killian said capacity enrollment in the full-day program is 18 children, but it has averaged just three or four children for nearly a year. That is vastly different from the capacity enrollment of 20 students the program maintained during its first year.

At least one former participant said she removed her child from the program because of staff concerns. Killian said she could not identify the cause of the decline, but she is investigating program content, staff and other issues that might have caused the program to fail.

"We are checking into that, yes," said Killian. "All I can tell you with certainty is we have been operating in the red the past two years."

She said the enrollment decline also might be caused because older siblings and other family members are available to watch program participants in the summer.

"At this point in time, sometimes it's better to stop and take a look and see what we need to do to make it work," she said. "Our problem has just been in keeping parents enrolled and interested in the full-day program."

Staff will be laid off for the remainder of the summer just as the staff of half-day Head Start programs are. The program has been discontinued indefinitely, although Killian said she hopes to reopen it next summer.

Said Killian: "We regret that we had to do this. If there was another option, we would have taken that."