Head Start Losing Its Site--but Who's Losing Sight?

It's not as though anyone in Yorba Linda is saying to Head Start: Get out of town.

But Head Start, which now serves 88 preschoolers on an elementary school site, is getting out of town June 30 when its five-year lease ends.

Though city and school district officials want to help find the preschool program a new home, no one can guarantee that it will happen.

Does that sound right?

Does it sound right that Yorba Linda, a once-sleepy burg that continues to emerge and now sports a median home price 20% above the countywide average, has no room for the Head Start portable facility that's been parked outside Mabel Paine Elementary School for the past five years?

It is left to Head Start supervisor Marlene Mitchell to lament, "We have a home, but no place to go."

Its "home" is the multiroom modular facility that provides the wide range of preschool activities that most people agree is instrumental in helping low-income youngsters prepare for kindergarten. The modular can move if someone can find a place for it to go.

For the last five years, the Placentia-Yorba Linda School District has let Head Start operate at Mabel Paine for $1 a year. But with a new housing development imminent in the hills behind the school, the district needs extra space on the Mabel Paine site, and that means the Head Start modular must go.

School district administrator Kim Stallings says the district isn't happy about ending the lease. "We've been very supportive of Head Start," Stallings says. "That was demonstrated when we donated property to them for five years. Our problem is that big housing development. Our deal with that development is that we will build a school but not until they've built quite a few homes. The first few hundred kids, we've got no place to put them. We always planned to put them here [at Mabel Paine]. We told Head Start that for a long time."

If so, there's been a communications gap, for Mitchell and new Head Start Executive Director Neil Yoneji (who took over in December) say they first heard in January that the lease wouldn't be renewed and that no other site existed in Yorba Linda.

Mitchell acknowledges that, far from turning a cold shoulder, both city and school officials vowed to help with relocation. But Mitchell and Yoneji are worried that some of Yorba Linda's poor families may not be able to get their children to other locations.