Dr. MENDELSOHN. This is one of the ways I would judge, coming back to a previous question, that I would judge the effectiveness of a program. I would like to know if the public school ever decides to include parents as teacher aides and, if so, to what extent.

I am even more concerned about that feature than I am about the issue of class size.

I think the Headstart class size is ideal, but I don't think it is as crucial as having teacher aides consisting of parents and others participate in the activities.

I would like to come back to the question of alcoholism.

I don't have any way of knowing how many parents of the children are alcoholics. One could argue both ways, that there are obviously a lot, or that there are obviously very few.

It is almost like the question of the mental retardation, which, as I said, melts away.

I wouldn't be surprised if we find a lot of things like alcoholism melting away, the incidence diminishing, as the kinds of inputs in Headstart come into action.

Senator HUGHES. I think what you have concluded from your observations and experience is important that with early detection and with a parent on the scene, the problems that begin in school and would otherwise go undetected until later years can be solved. It is one of the greatest contributions of the Headstart program.

Dr. MENDELSOHN. It has been a truism that child development begins with the grandparent.

If someone were to give me the opportunity to choose how to care for the kind of retarded and disturbed children that we now have and the ones that we might identify in the near future, I might be faced with a choice of where to spend my money.

Some might argue that the money would be best spent on the children. Even though I am a pediatrician, I could argue very convincingly that money might be better spent on a foster grandparent program. I have been associated with two of those programs now, one at Cook County Hospital, and I have seen children who have not responded to any other modality, educational care, medical care, nutrition, or anything else, respond to the foster grandparent program.

I think we should take a look at the other end of the age spectrum and start figuring out how money spent there could more economically and more effectively assist the very children we are trying to serve. In a sense, we who are in child development have lost something by not looking at the whole spectrum.

I would even go so far as to question whether the generation gap is a natural phenomenon, like Niagara Falls, or whether the generation gap is something that we ourselves have created, by increasing the powerlessness and diminishing the influence of older folks, so that there is very little incentive for communication between the young and old in our country.

Yet, the things that increase their dignity and mobility, like the foster grandparent program, have had a remarkable influence on the children they serve.

I think there are 8,000 foster grandparents around the country, and I think that we, as pediatricians and child development specialists. should be recommending 800,000 now, and that would be one

the ways to treat the children, to treat the grandparents, to bring the natural family into the situation, and to relieve the pressures on the professionals in the institutions.

The demand for nurses has gone down at one hospital. The staff wants to increase the foster grandparent staff.

We have done it in a different way, if I may just pursue this point. I am on the board of an old folks' home, and we reversed it and ran a foster grandchild program. We took Neighborhood Youth Corps girls and assigned them to old folks. These were girls who had dropped out of school between ages 16 and 19.

We assigned each one to an elderly male or female. I think the average age was 82.

We told them to go ahead and treat them like they would treat their own grandparent. They took them to physiotherapy, and even learned how to perform a number of services; and they fixed up the ladies' hair and stuff like that, and they really mobilized the old person.

Of course, the program got into a little trouble, because the ladies in the home would say to the young girls, "How come you are not in school?" And a number of girls went back to school, and we had to go out and do a little more recruiting.

It really requires revolution in our thinking, to think in terms of family, because this country has traditionally thought in terms of individuals.

We talk about individual enterprise, and individual initiative, and rugged individualists, and yet in my thinking that is not the proper unit that we should try to influence.

I think that Project Headstart has pointed the way in this.

It is almost as if Headstart began along one direction and got into another. I think the original literature of Headstart was much more child oriented, and that as the years have gone by, the influence of the family has received increased appreciation.

Senator HUGHES. I think, undoubtedly, Doctor, you must love your work, and I think the message from Israel has been that children take their parents back to church.

I want to thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator NELSON. Thank you, Senator Hughes, and thank you, Dr. Mendelsohn, for your helpful contribution here.

Dr. MENDELSOHN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee.

Senator MONDALE. I would like to join the chairman in expressing my appreciation to Dr. Mendelsohn for his excellent work and his testimony.

Senator NELSON. We will now call Mrs. Christine Branche, directing supervisor, Division of Early Childhood, Cleveland Board of Education, Cleveland, Ohio.

STATEMENT OF MRS. CHRISTINE BRANCHE, DIRECTING SUPERVISOR, DIVISION OF EARLY CHILDHOOD, CLEVELAND BOARD OF EDUCATION, CLEVELAND, OHIO

Senator NELSON. The committee is very pleased to have you take the time to come here today, Mrs. Branche. You may present your statement in any way you desire.

Mrs. BRANCHE. Good morning, and I am grateful to be here to speak to the point of a bill that is of great concern to many of us.

I find my position in the lineup this morning particularly interesting, because after having heard the public schools of our country taken a little to task, and necessarily so, I began to wonder if maybe I am not really a part of a school system, because we were beginning to sound more atypical every minute.. When I go back and tell the superintendent that, he will welcome it, I am sure.

I hesitate to read to you, because that bothers me, and I know that most of you are capable of reading.

This is a summary, not necessarily full comments.

I got notice to arrive this morning late Friday afternoon, but I certainly could not pass up the opportunity to appear on this important point.

I am directing supervisor of the Division of Early Childhood Education of the Cleveland public schools, I am a parent program consultant for Headstart and I was on the Commission that designed Project Follow Through, so I have been involved in early childhood programing in a variety of ways.

I really am a little concerned that suddenly we have discovered little children, and we are questioning whether it is valid to be concerned about them as we are.

Motherhood and the flag used to be sacred, and now they are questioning motherhood and burning the flag, and I am beginning to wonder about little children.

So I hope we can mobilize the kind of concern that is necessary to preserve the lives of many of our young children.

I would be more than happy to answer questions and discuss points along the way. In fact, I prefer it that way.

The Cleveland public schools, under the leadership of Paul W. Briggs, is firmly committed to maximizing the learning potential of every child as early as possible regardless of class or color.

This necessarily involves an effort toward the removal of all possible learning inhibitors both individual and environmental. Our experience backed by definitive national research mandates the need for increased stress on prevention programing in addition to remediation and compensatory programs.

Toward this effort, the Cleveland public schools have committed a major portion of the available Federal and State funds to expanded services in early childhood education.

The division of early childhood was born last August really as a result of these kinds of Federal programs providing an entirely new direction for the schools in our involvement with young children, the community and their families.

Senator MONDALE. Are you using title I moneys?

Mrs. BRANCHE. Yes; we have something interesting going on in Cleveland. We talk to each other in Cleveland which, as a consultant, I know is not necessarily typical.

We do communicate, because it is not just the school system that is concerned about children, but many facets of the community.

So, when Headstart came along with full-year programing late in 1965, and title I came along in 1966, we worked together with the CAP agency in Cleveland to figure out how we could get the mo impact in our community for children and for their families.

So, the school system uses title I programs and technically runs a Headstart program in 80 centers year round, and uses OEO funds for summer Headstart, allowing funds, therefore, that would not be available otherwise, perhaps, for other agencies in the community to run full-year Headstart.

We have a problem of space in our schools, and could not possibly serve all those children unless we had funds that would allow for correction of facilities, which this bill might provide.

It doesn't make any difference who serves the children as long as the children get the service and the families get the service as soon as possible.

We do have a Project Follow Through in Cleveland, and a little bit of everything out there for our children.

We do disseminate the information back and forth, so no one is working in a vacuum.

We do have in Cleveland probably the largest breakfast program in the country, and I must speak to how this came about.

We believe that no one knows young children better than their parents, and that the parents of these young children were their first teachers and are the most vital influences in their lives, and we say this loud, long, and repeatedly.

Certainly, there are many educators not convinced of this yet. We see children 3 to 5 hours a day. That is a very small portion of their total life span in a day, and we know the environmental influences of their lives do have an impact on their learning ability.

The parents in our programs are part of a general advisory committee for the whole system. We have advisors in all the early childhood programs. The parents asked that we try a breakfast program in the fall of 1965.

We were on the hot-food-for-lunch binge, though we do not have kitchens in our public schools in Cleveland.

The parents said, "Why are you so involved for lunch? The children come home, and we have to feed the other children also. Breakfast is the most difficult meal of the day."

So, we began a breakfast program.

We have had kindergartens for 78 years, so I am speaking about the 4-year-old when I say "preschool children."

The breakfast program was successful. The attendance went up markedly, and as soon as the Department of Agriculture made it available, we began to serve breakfast to 43,000 children a day, by June. We have had this kind of thing because parents have been concerned.

We are not concerned with a piece of the child, but the whole child, and not with any particular discipline, but with an interdisciplinary approach, that was really delivered on the scene to education by Headstart.

Educators don't like to feel that somebody outside the profession came along and did this innovative thing, but it is true, and we recognize it as a fact.

We feel the only way an impact can be made is to mobilize education, health and social services in full cooperation with the home and the Community so that we can provide for the needs of the families well.

I am aware of the controversy going on now about the validity of these kinds of programs and the questioning of the data. It is as though all of a sudden somebody discovered children and now they are questioning what we are doing with them.

I welcome, really, as an educator, this kind of concern. It has turned a spotlight on an area of education that certainly desperately needs it, but it must be remembered, and certainly with young children, that you cannot reduce everything to data, and that every kind of improvement or every kind of gain is not instantly retrievable.

I was amused at some of the early data-gathering devices, when they wanted to know how many kids learned to skip the first week, and things like this that I suppose are relevant in one area, but certainly not the broad spectrum we are concerned about.

Data does not, with 4-year-olds, give us the kind of recall that children are going to have to have later.

Who knows when a child is going to be able to draw on the experiences he was provided in these programs, and the families as well?

We try to take the families along, and possible to go on trips, and take them into events. When I say family, I don't say mother and father. This tends to prejudge a life style, and we don't have that right, either.

We are concerned with whomever is in that household functioning as a family unit, and try to involve that family unit in the education of the child.

We certainly recognize that the health of the child, thus improved, as you can do in these kinds of programs, will necessarily allow children to function at a higher level. How you test this, who knows, because you don't know how poorly he would have been functioning had his defect not been cured.

The other thing that is difficult to collect in data is how much reinforcement is playing a part.

With families playing a part in the programs, you begin to get reinforcement in the home and community, and who knows how much value this has in preference to that which might not exist?

But if you are specifics oriented, and I think a large part of the public is, you might like to hear some of the things we have seen in the past 5 years.

Attendance in the target areas has gone up considerably. In fact, in the first month of the breakfast program, it went up 10 percent. Senator NELSON. You mean average daily attendance?

Mrs. BRANCHE. Average daily attendance, and you can't do much about teaching them if they don't get there.

During the riots 2 years ago, which Cleveland had going on in the course of the Headstart program, not one Headstart program closed. Attendance was not reduced, none of the staff was apprehended in any way, and Headstart went on as usual.

No windows were broken in the target schools that weekend. That indicates some of the kinds of bridges that are being built to the community.

Senator MONDALE. Has Mayor Stokes demonstrated an interest in this? Mrs. BRANCHE. Yes.