Welcome to the playground

By Kathie Neff Ragsdale
Staff Writer

LAWRENCE -- It won't be your average day care center.

A dedication ceremony will be May 19 for an expanded Head Start center that will look like a Victorian home and feature an outdoor "adventure playground" with a bamboo forest, underground tunnel and a slide built into a hill.

The $707,000 project will enlarge Head Start's current center at 246 Andover St. to handle double its current enrollment of 34 youngsters. The money will go toward buying the property, renovating the old building, constructing the new one and installing the playground.

"We really want a home feeling," Head Start Director Anne D'Errico said of the facility, which will be open all day, year-round.

Head Start, administered locally by the Greater Lawrence Community Action Council, is a federal program that provides preschoolers from low-income families with education and recreational opportunities to prepare them for school. In Greater Lawrence, 533 youngsters and their families are served at seven Head Start centers.

D'Errico said Head Start programs have become even more important as welfare reform has pushed parents off the welfare rolls, through job training and into jobs, often at minimum wage. With the cost of full-day child care running $10,000 to $11,000 a year, those newly employed parents could not afford regular day care, she said.

"The fact that we are able to expand and have more parents going into the work force, even with higher unemployment, is something we're very proud of," D'Errico said.

She said land acquisition is becoming more and more critical for Head Start centers, which often operate in private or public schools where they have no guarantee they can stay long-term. As an example, she said, officials at St. Patrick's School in Lawrence have notified Head Start the program operating there, with 145 children, will need to find a new home a year from August. Only two of the seven local Head Starts are agency-owned, she said.

D'Errico said the new, one-acre Head Start center will include an area outdoors for gardening, and an archway made of local granite that will include prisms "to create rainbows across the entire playground." A four-foot-high tunnel, with "Swiss cheese" holes to allow adults to look in, will also be included in the playground, as well as a bike path and hopscotch area.

The dedication is one of several activities Greater Lawrence Community Action Council is sponsoring this month. A community action breakfast, staff team-building conference and youth career awareness day are among others.