Lakeland May Lose Head Start Center Tight Budget Means Tough Decision On Fate Of Spirit Lake Facility

The music of childrens’ voices once again graces the halls of Coeur d’Alene’s former Harding Elementary School.

But as one old school is revived for the North Idaho Head Start program, another one in Spirit Lake is facing the end of an era.

A tight budget is forcing Head Start to find ways to cut costs, and the Lakeland Head Start center is its likeliest target.

On March 23, the same day the Harding Family Center holds its open house in Coeur d’Alene, Head Start’s governing council will determine the fate of the Lakeland center.

Closing it will affect 18 families and three employees.

“I started as a janitor and then a teacher’s aide, and worked my way up,” said the center’s manager Karen Briscoe, a Lakeland High School graduate whose own daughter attended the Head Start program 24 years ago.

Briscoe, 43, attended eighth grade in the old brick structure that now houses the civic center, senior center and, in the basement, Head Start.

Closing the facility will mean a pay cut for Briscoe and a drive to Post Falls or Coeur d’Alene to work.

For her clients, it means more isolation and less access to educational and health services for their children. Head Start is a federally funded program that’s designed to break the cycle of poverty.

“This is the first time we’ve considered having to do something like this,” said Charles Brown, director of North Idaho Head Start.

Head Start got a 3 percent cost-ofliving increase in its funding for next year. That’s a tiny fraction of what the program needs to be fully funded - a distant promise of the early Clinton Administration.

In North Idaho, and statewide, the program only serves 21 percent of the children who are eligible to participate. The waiting list for the Coeur d’Alene program is about 100 names long. The list for Post Falls is almost that long, Brown said.

The waiting list for the Spirit Lake site is relatively short in comparison.

“Idaho is one of the lowest-served states,” Brown said. “Other states put in state dollars.”

The Idaho Head Start Association unsuccessfully lobbied the Legislature this year for $400,000 to add at least one class to each program.

“That would certainly have helped Spirit Lake,” said Kathy Pavesic, the association’s executive director.

Even if participants are lost in the Spirit Lake and Athol area, more families will be served at Harding.

“It’s more efficient to put another class in this building because we’re already heating it,” Brown said from his new office in the Harding Family Center. “It’s gotten to that point.”

Head Start purchased Harding School for $400,000 last year with a $100,000 grant that covered the down payment. Renting space to other family service programs is helping Head Start pay off its 20-year loan.

Though Idaho Head Start programs are getting no less money than in past years, and are not anticipating cuts in federal funding, cuts to other programs will effect Head Start, Pavesic said.

For instance, 3,200 children are expected to be dropped from Idaho’s child and adult food care programs over the next five years, she said. That means Head Start will have to pay more to feed kids breakfast and lunch.

Head Start also is facing higher costs in employee health insurance and utilities, Brown said.

Though Briscoe is sentimental at the likely closure of the Lakeland Center, she’s ultimately practical.

“It’s dollars and cents. You have to do what’s most effective,” she said.

The open house at Harding Family Center, 411 N. 15th St., is from 4 to 6 p.m. March 23.

Graphic: Head start misses many