If the worst thing Community Action Organization and its Head Start program is guilty of is carelessness, that trait seems to manifest itself in alarming ways.
There was the 3-year-old in Niagara Falls who strayed out of her Head Start classroom onto the street, unnoticed by teachers, until a parent found her – between 30 seconds and 15 minutes later, depending on whom you believe. And a story in The News on Thursday reported on instances of sloppy record-keeping connected to services for students with disabilities, equipment inventories that did not match financial records, and salaries charged to the wrong grant year.
Concerns in the federal agency that oversees Head Start about deficiencies in the program may endanger renewal of its $30 million in annual grants in Niagara and Erie counties.
A major pain point is the underperformance of the program’s core mission: instructing children. The Head Start program in Erie County ranked among the lowest 10 percent of comparable programs in the country, based on classroom observations compiled by the Administration for Children and Families, the federal agency that oversees Head Start.
If that were not shameful enough, government evaluators reported that 11 percent of the agency’s teachers in Erie and Niagara counties did not have the required qualifications.
Head Start receives the most grant money of any program run by CAO, an anti-poverty agency. The purpose is to promote school readiness for children in low-income families.
Educators preach about the importance of building up children’s cognitive, social and emotional development in the preschool years and early grades. That’s a primary focus of Buffalo Schools Superintendent Kriner Cash and his New Education Bargain. By high school, bad habits are too ingrained, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
How did CAO’s leadership allow Head Start to lapse into the bottom 10 percent in the nation? If there is any hope of using education as a tool to build a new Buffalo, our Head Start program needs to be in the top 10 percent, not a bottom feeder.
The News reported that Erie County’s Head Start program last year scored 2.1 points out of a possible 7 in a federal rating system used to assess the quality of instruction. The national median is 2.9, while nine years ago a federal review gave Erie County’s program a 3.4 score.
The downward trend is disturbing, but apparently CAO’s L. Nathan Hare, chief executive officer, was unaware of it.
“We have no idea where you got your information about CAO’s program rankings. We are not aware of that,” Hare told The News by email. A 2018 letter about the low scores from the Administration for Children and Families included Hare among the letter’s intended recipients.
It was concern among board members over CAO’s use of federal dollars for Head Start that led to the hiring of an auditor to examine the books last year. The organization put a stop to the forensic audit and Hare said an auditor was never hired, a claim contradicted by a copy of the contract with an accounting firm obtained by The News.
We don’t know if the FBI and State Attorney General’s Office will find evidence of misconduct as they probe CAO, but signs of incompetence are painfully obvious.
