Head Start misses deadline to get toys for local kids

Some 330 Head Start preschool children in South Hampton Roads will miss out on a Salvation Army toy giveaway this year because Head Start leaders missed an October deadline for applying for the holiday assistance program, representatives of both groups said.

"We're saddened by it. It brings us no joy to turn people away," said Matthew Pochily, spokesman for the Salvation Army's Tidewater Area Command, which also handles holiday distribution for the Joy Fund, Toys for Tots and Angel Tree from a warehouse near the Virginia Beach Town Center.

"We're at capacity now," Seth Atkinson, the organization's business manager, explained. "We just can't go adding hundreds of families and children after the deadline."

In all, Atkinson said, the Salvation Army will distribute toys this year to some 20,000 children from low-income families through the combined programs, roughly the same number as last year.

In previous years, Atkinson said, applications for Head Start children were submitted centrally by the Southeastern Tidewater Opportunity Project, which operated the area's 32 Head Start centers until it ran into financial trouble earlier this year.

CDI, a Denver-based management company that took over Head Start in March, apparently was not aware of the program and failed to apply, Atkinson said. He said a handful of centers applied on their own, but most did not.

Calls to the local CDI office were referred to the Administration for Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Head Start nationally.

An email from that office Tuesday afternoon offered no explanation as to why CDI did not apply for the program.

Sharon McClure, a Head Start volunteer at the Newpointe center in Norfolk, said she suspected something was amiss earlier this month when she and other parents realized they hadn't received postcards inviting their families to the Salvation Army's distribution site, as they had in the past.

"When I called the first week of November, I was told it was up to us to get the applications in and the cut-off date was the Friday before," McClure said. She said she offered to rush the applications over the following day. "But they said it was too late, and maybe we'd have better luck next year."

McClure said she was surprised and disappointed that no one from the Salvation Army had communicated with the Head Start centers ahead of the deadline.

Atkinson, who has directed the holiday assistance program the past four years, said he had always worked through STOP's contact person and had no way of notifying individual centers. He said he heard from about four centers just before the Oct. 21 deadline and sent them applications.

"It wasn't until they started to contact me that I even realized that there was no longer a central contact person," Atkinson said.

He said he advised the callers to "pass the word that they needed to get their applications in and we'd take care of it."

Once the deadline passed, Atkinson said, "We really had to stand by it. It's saddening and it's frustrating, but I have so many families on hand now that I'm struggling to find where we're going to be able to provide them with toys."

McClure said employees and volunteers at her center and others are trying to find another source of toys for their children, but so far they've had no luck.

Jeff Sheler, (757) 222-5563, jeff.sheler@pilotonline.com