Preschool program moves, consolidates

By LINDSAY VanHULLE
lvanhulle@record-eagle.com

October 09, 2008 12:00 am

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TRAVERSE CITY -- The Head Start preschool program for Grand Traverse County moved some classrooms and consolidated others as the result of rising rents and flat funding levels.

Head Start, a federally funded program that provides free preschool classes to low-income and at-risk children, opened two classrooms this fall at the Traverse Bay Area Career-Tech Center on Parsons Road.

There are 147 Head Start students enrolled throughout the county.

The one-year agreement came as Head Start administrators sought to find a new site before the lease expired on their main building near Chum's Corner in Blair Township.

Costs to rent the space at the Career-Tech Center, known as the Discovery Children's Center, run $540 per month or $6,550 per year, Head Start director Kathy Kundrat said.

"We filled up at TBA right away," she said. "Everything seems to be going well."

The Career-Tech Center space was available after the intermediate school district closed a tuition-based preschool program.

The district was not able to financially sustain it, in part because of rising costs for employee benefits, Principal Jason Jeffrey said.

Working with Head Start allows the center's early childhood education students to gain field experience, as they did with the former preschool, he said.

"It made more sense to partner with an outside agency, rather than continue to raise tuition rates," he said. "They have an opportunity to work in a facility on this side of town."

The program also kept three classrooms in its Chum's Corner location, since the building's owner agreed to lease half the space -- which, in essence, is half the cost, Kundrat said.

Head Start will stay there for now, "until we can come up with some other new ideas," she said.

Parents are pleased the Blair Township site remained, since it serves a pocket of families from nearby Grawn and Interlochen, said Nikia Parker, a Manton mother who takes her daughter there on her way to work.

"If they had moved it across town, we probably could have worked it out, but we're one of the few who could have," said Parker, a Head Start parent representative. "They would have had to drive clear across town, and when you have a job, a lot of times that's just not feasible."

Kundrat discussed renting space from Traverse City Area Public Schools, but said no classrooms were open in buildings that would have been convenient for families. The district remains a future possibility.

Head Start also has classrooms at the former Oak Park Elementary, a site in Long Lake Township and at St. Mary's of Hannah School near Kingsley.