Monday, December 6, 2004

Students to move into new school next month

By Tim Wacker
Staff Writer

LAWRENCE -- It took three R's of a different sort to find a new home for a Head Start early learning center in the heart of the city.

Remove, renovate and relocate.

A former chiropractor's office will soon be classrooms and playgrounds for 100 needy students being moved from 10 classrooms they occupied at St. Patrick's School for the past decade.

About 18 months ago, the church told the Greater Lawrence Head Start it needed the rooms back. The search for a new school ended about a year later with a two-story business building on a quarter-acre of land that needed lots of work.

"When they first told us we had to move, we had nothing," said Vincent Dolan, Head Start operations manager. "But we've been building and renovating a lot of places, it wasn't that difficult for us."

That's because the 7,000-square-foot facility is the second new project Head Start has undertaken in the city in as many years. Last year, the program cut the ribbon on a $700,000 expansion of its Andover Street school.

The Bruce Street building will provide pre-school and infant/toddler services for needy Lawrence families with children as young as 15 months.

Three upstairs classrooms and a reception area smelling of fresh spackle yesterday are expected to be ready for a Jan. 18 grand opening. Workers were mulching landscaping on the new facility's eco-playground, one of two playgrounds taking up 10,000 square feet of open space surrounding the building.

"You won't find a swing set there," Dolan said, pointing to the collection of large stones that supported a 5-foot mound of earth and fresh grass in the middle of the lot abutting the new school. "Most of these kids live in apartment buildings and haven't even seen a hill like that," he said.

It's $854,000 worth of instructional and recreational facilities that will provide badly needed services for a city that has needs that seem to be growing. The Greater Lawrence Head Start program, which is administered by the Greater Lawrence Community Action Council, has a $6.5 million annual budget, said Charles LoPiano, the assistant executive director of the council.

That's a big chunk of the $6.5 billion spent on Head Start programs nationwide, LoPiano said, but it's still not enough to meet the city's needs. There are 538 students enrolled in the Greater Lawrence Head Start with another 300 to 400 on waiting lists.

"We have many more Head Start-eligible children than we have facilities to serve them," LoPiano said.

Still, the Bruce Street location represents a new approach by Greater Lawrence Head Start to meet the needs of the city's poor, which have been mostly met through rented buildings such as St. Patrick's. Head Start brought the Bruce Street property and paid for the improvements through a $213,000 federal grant and $641,000 bank loan.

It will house 15 staff who will be taking care of 100 students -- half between 2 and 5 years old. The rest will be infant/toddlers who have special needs that are being built into a building Head Start will now own, not rent.

"You need cribs, you need changing tables and you need more teachers," LoPiano said. "It's very costly to do infant/toddler care."

It's also a welcome addition to the community, both men said. The location on the corner of Bruce and Park streets is a "target area" of the city in need of Head Start services, Dolan said.

"They would have had an empty building here," he said. "Now, with the kids and parents and staff, they have a vibrant entity."