PRESS ROOM

Inside the beltway
By John McCaslin

Federal flyspeckers

    National Head Start Association (NHSA) board Chairman Ron Herndon has been administering a regional Head Start program "for decades now, and I can honestly say that I have never seen anything like this OSHA-run-amok style of flyspecking that federal reviewers are now exhibiting in order to taint the good name of Head Start programs."
    This time you can't finger OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Instead, hundreds of Head Start grantees charge they are being unfairly tagged by Department of Health and Human Services review teams as being out of compliance with federal standards under a wide range of subjective and even bizarre "parking ticket" citations.
    They include flashlights with dead batteries, toaster-oven crumbs said to pose a fire hazard unless cleaned every day, unraked playground leaves described as a "choking hazard," even a toddler's lunch money trumped up into a fiscal management complaint.
    NHSA President and CEO Sarah Greene says "bogus" noncompliance findings are suddenly being handed out routinely by Uncle Sam's investigators, who, she suspects, have been instructed to find problems in nearly every program they inspect.
    "[W]e cannot stand by idly and watch as people falsely claim that their agenda is 'accountability' when that is just a label that they have hijacked in order to disguise their true intent of dismantling Head Start as it exists today," she says of the nationwide effort, which represents more than 1 million children in 2,700 Head Start programs in the United States.
    President Bush has long proposed turning control of Head Start over to the states. Democrats argue that would jeopardize what has been a successful preschool program for the poor.

    Basket case
    My obesity just isn't funny,
    And I'm suing for bundles of money:
    When a basket of candy
    Is too full and too handy,
    Who's to blame but the old Easter Bunny?
    -- F.R. Duplantier

    •John McCaslin, whose column is nationally syndicated, can be reached at 202/636-3284 or jmccaslin@washingtontimes.com.

Inside the beltwayBy John McCaslin

Federal flyspeckers

Inside the beltway
By John McCaslin