ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 18, 1996 TAG: 9608190128
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL BOLLING
I READ with interest the July 14 commentary by Mary Ellen Verdu, "Allen administration has done a job on working families." She took the opportunity to castigate the Allen administration and the Allen-appointed Council on Child Day Care and Early Childhood Programs for allegedly dismantling child-care programs serving low-income working families in Virginia. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The truth is that the Allen administration has removed layers of expensive and redundant bureaucracy by eliminating the Council on Child Day Care and Early Childhood Programs. It has also conscientiously reapportioned funds from federal block-grant programs in a manner that will best assist low-income working Virginians.
Verdu lauds the former Baliles-appointed Council on Child Day Care and Early Childhood Programs for spending federal funds on such programs as "technical assistance" and "parent education," and chastises the Allen administration for the programs' removal. What she failed to tell her readers is that the programs funded by the Baliles-appointed council included "parent education" on the highly personal and private decision of who should care for their children while parents are working, and "technical assistance" to train child day-care workers. Unfortunately, the funding of these unnecessary bureaucratic programs took money away from direct services to needy families.
The Allen administration had its priorities in order when it decided to use as much as possible of available federal block-grant funds on direct assistance for subsidized child care. Parents served by these programs are either working or are in an educational program, and most are trying hard to make ends meet and stay off welfare. It's incomprehensible to me that the Allen administration would be accused of undermining the status of the working poor when he has shifted funds away from wasteful, pork-barrel programs and into subsidies that directly assist Virginia families.
Verdu also attempts to justify the need for redundant "resource and referral" programs. These programs are merely another expensive and intrusive product of omnipresent government, rightly eliminated by the Allen administration for the block-grant expenditures.
Information about licensed and exempt child-care programs can easily be obtained from the Department of Social Services, and families served by the block-grant program who need additional assistance in finding child care can obtain help from DSS caseworkers.
Verdu mocks a report of the Allen-appointed Council on Child Day Care and Early Childhood Programs that was concerned with the philosophical tilt of child-care policies. The material at issue, the anti-bias curriculum of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, is in fact an alarming blueprint for teaching liberal dogma to our children while they are held captive in child-care programs. Topics in the curriculum's "multicultural" agenda run the gamut from teaching "tolerance" of homosexuality and condoning single-sex marriages to a revisionist history of Thanksgiving as a celebration of the ravaging of the Indians. This curriculum is indeed radical, and it undermines the moral and religious traditions of a vast majority of Virginians.
The Allen administration should be commended for its efforts to transform child-care policy in a manner that directly benefits working families, respects the authority of parents in child rearing, and eliminates expensive programs of dubious worth to taxpayers. Virginia's families will be served well by these changes.
Bill Bolling, a Hanover Republican, serves on the Virginia Senate's Committee of Rehabilitation and Social Services that oversees welfare and child-care programs in Virginia.
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