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The program had scarcely started when investigators claimed that fully one-fourth of the youths drawing salaries came from families well above the poverty line. One indiscreet Youth Corps girl tooled to work in a 1965 Thunderbird, was asked to resign. In Macoupin County, Ill., Democratic officials turned the program into a patronage pie for their children until OEO found out and ordered 83 youngsters dropped. Protested one $9,000-a-year Democrat jobholder whose stepson was bounced: "He comes from a broken home, don't he? Anyway, to the victors goes the spoils. You know what I mean?"
-VISTA. The "domestic Peace Corps" has volunteers aged 18 to 80, and if anything, they are even more idealistic than the ones who went abroad. "There's probably a little less glory this way, at home, but it's more important than going overseas," said New Yorker Barbara Dunlap, a 22-year-old Skidmore graduate who lives in a Pima Indian settlement near Phoenix. "You have to solve your problems at home first." Paid $50 a month plus a subsistence allowance that varies from kregion to region, living at roughly the same level as the people they are helping, some 3,500 VISTAS are deployed from the Everglades to the Yukon, one-third working on Indian reservations and in migrant labor camps, the rest scattered from Harlem to the hollows of Appalachia.
-HEAD START. Launched with a modest budget of $17 million and a target of 100,000 needy preschool children, the venture has proved the poverty program's best success. The response was nearly six times greater than anticipated, with 560,000 pupils in 2,400 communities attending classes for two months last summer. On the average, the children added eight to ten points to their IQs and 14 months to their intellectual performances. Not least of Head Start's achievements has been to nip budding health problems by giving its children complete medical exams—their first in most cases. In Boston, one-third were found to have major physical ailments or mental problems requiring clinical care, or both. Four out of five had advanced tooth decay. Of all the children enrolled nationwide, 100,000 needed glasses.
Lyndon Johnson has requested $310 million to train 700,000 students in fiscal 1967, but Powell's committee would like to give him $400 million to train 845,000. Exhilarated by the program's success last summer, the President announced plans to turn Head Start into a year-round program for 350,000 needy children, only to discover that it would have cost three times as much money as was available. The upshot was an administrative nightmare. Communities deluged Washington with applications, and OEO had to reject or pigeonhole scores of them.