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Show Bauman Says . ! Headstart Or Hindsight? j r ' round later in the week. From lunch time to lunch time we had visitors from OEO headquart-) headquart-) ers in Washington. Washing-ton. Most of these people sat and watched children eating for fifteen or By J. BAUMAN (Editor's Note: In this third and last addition to his three-part three-part series. Dealing with race problems in general and the Head Start program in particular, Bauman Bau-man presests his conclusions about the War on Poverty.) When classes finally began at my Head Start center, predictable chaos engulfed the whole program from the students to the teachers to the administration. We made an inventory; two weeks later we were told the office had lost it and we were to make another. This massive mas-sive stupidity was repeated at the end of the summer. This proved extremely difficult; we had trouble remembering what the kids had torn to shreads (for example: my cardboard "Superduper Market" didn't last long) and what assorted aids, teachers, social workers had donated. Checks were misplaced. Equipment dribbled in from time to time, but some remained misterous-ly misterous-ly missing the entire two months I worked with Head Start. Floor space was inadequate; a small em-pitigo em-pitigo plague resulted. And whenever when-ever a child showed up with a severe se-vere cold I could count on having three or four children sniffling a- J. Bauman twenty minutes, looked vaguely around the center for a while, then went back into the bureaucratic limbo from which the came. The usual result: a mimeographed mi-meographed letter arriving several weeks later and advising us to use stainless steel utensils rather than plastic ones. '(Naturally enough, when the office provided the kids with them, there was bloodshed: somebody was forever sticking a lethal-looking little fork into somebody some-body else.) Things began to look up two weeks after classes began, when a monstrous jungle jim was flopped all dissassembled, on the weed-ridden backyard that was our playground. play-ground. Things looked back down two months later when the giant toy was still rusting, still disassembled, disas-sembled, where it was left. Seems there was some red tape connected with digging holes for the jungle jim and pouring concrete in them. A Negro teacher informed me it was 'because "the Authorities don't want us messing up the church's lawn." You could hear the capital A. There were the unavoidable T feuds. One I remember particularly, particular-ly, developed when an extremely ignorant white aide with an extremely ex-tremely loud voice decided she had heard one of the "Authorities" say t we teachers were not supposed to arrive and leave the same time our aides did. (The children at the center cen-ter for about eight and three quarters quar-ters hours, and we worked eight-hour eight-hour shifts. If you arrived at 7:30 you left at 3:30; if you came at 8:30 you left half past four. The children usually got to the centers cen-ters at about quarter to eight and left around four-fifteen. Sometimes it happened that a teacher and an aide boh had to leave at 3:30, or arrive at 7:30. In such cases one of the cafeteria workers or another ano-ther aide or teacher would watch the children the three quarters of an hour when their regular teacher and aide were not around. Nobody found anything really wrong with this plan; there were always plenty of spare people floating around.) Even the aide with the loud voice didn't fault this program; her only complaint was that "one of the Authorities" who turned out to have been the receptionist at the office had ruled that the children's chil-dren's aide or teacher was to be with them at all times. The mud dredged up by that woman arA J those who argued with her would ' have knocked out an experienced old politician. The battle raged for hours before someone dragged the "Authorities' 'into it. The "Authorities" "Author-ities" said that the receptionist had no say in the matter in the first place, and secondly she meant that the children were not to be left unsuperviesd. On the whole, though, the program pro-gram was an enormous waste of money. This was due to sloppy management, lack of funds for equipment (I gather that's why we' were always short, though I don't know), the total lack of cooperation coopera-tion by the local segregationist power structure (particularly the School Board, which could have helped us out), and the fact that we could reach only an insignificant portion of the deprived children in that county. And you might add the idiocy of nearly everyone connected con-nected with the program to that list. I think every government faced with a revolution tries to slap together to-gether some patch-work reforms to head off the insurrection. Sometimes Some-times this is successful, sometimes it is not. It has been pointed out that revolutions do not errupt among the totally disadvantaged; they start when an exploited people peo-ple begin to sense change and don't get it fast enough. This is a very crude way of putting it. You might say that revolutions are begun or hastened 'by frustrated expectations. ex-pectations. Ninety per cent of the deprived people of Worchester County whose children are not attending at-tending Head Start are going to be severely dissappointed when their children's names never reach the top of the list and "Head Start" doesn't turn out to be much. This being the case, it is possible that Head Sart and the OEO's activities ac-tivities in general may fan the riots they were suppossed to prevent. pre-vent. Obviously you cannot now back away from reform altogether and set up a caste system (as has been advocated) at this late stage; obviously continued piddling in this explosive area of race relations rela-tions by innept, ill-financed ama-ture ama-ture organizations like the OEO won't do much good either. We are faced with a choice between full-scale street fighting , and. enormous effort to wipe out poverty forever. |
