Susan Davis: “I must regretfully rise in opposition to a bill which I believe has many good elements. I see the Head Start program, as…”

“I must regretfully rise in opposition to a bill which I believe has many good elements. I see the Head Start program, as my colleagues do, as a successful and long-standing effort to engage low-income children in the preparation for kindergarten, that we know is readily available and enjoyed by children from more financially secure families. In fact, I have two of my current staff members who are graduates of the Head Start program, and so I know that the program indeed does work. I am pleased to support the requirements for relevant training for staff members, but the problem is that we really have not done the job of providing loan forgiveness for those staff members. We really have not done the job of finding a way for them to get the professional development that they need. We have talked about the religious discrimination introduction into this bill, and that is a real problem. But let me just talk about another problem. We have targeted title II, and we have targeted that for a very good reason, because in reality the bill fails; it fails to secure guarantees and require that States not supplant State or other Federal funds with Head Start funds.”