 Mrs. Mancero, my name is Mercedes, and I have four children. My husband's name is Simon, and he's a very good man. He loves the children, he, well, he feels proud, I guess. My husband, he was working on the tractor, and I was working on cutting the cauliflower. They would be throwing in the cauliflower, and I was the one who was cutting and throwing to the side, and he would be picking it up. That's how we met. He works very hard. He's always tired. The kids, they want to be playing with him, everything. The youngest is his bronzo. She's a very good baby. She takes good care of herself. Martha is the second. She bothers more than the smallest. Maybe she's a little jealous, maybe a little under something. You know, Agstein, he's a very good boy. Sometimes he does things, but that's the way boys are. Pancho was different. There was a time when Pancho wasn't like he is now. Before, he was slow, and now he's so active, he won't be still for a minute. Today, my husband goes to watch television and sit down with a baby. And the kids, they all sit down in the car and look at television, watching television. And I'm so in a little punch of the first one to go to sleep when he was sick, noticing this right away. Pancho was much bigger than Tino because he's two years older than Tino. And then Pancho didn't grow anymore. Instead of growing taller, he was growing wider, you know, looking sick all the time. And then Tino became the same size as Pancho, even though, you know, Pancho is two years older than Tino. And I used to have to dress him. He was just like a little baby. I remember, the son used to bother his eyes and used to squint all the time. He was always sick, sick, sick all the time. Welfare nurse, Marie, Mrs. Burke, came around. And she gets a lot about people, you know. She said that he didn't look quite right, but she couldn't say what it was. She told me about this school, summer school, and head starts that I could set Pancho to. Discussing this with Mrs. Mansara, I found that they couldn't afford private medical attention. Then I remembered that part of the program was a complete physical for each child. Pancho has received help and has improved. Mrs. Mansara has often told me how grateful she has been. Children who come from these isolated areas live a very dreary life because they're miles away from town. Usually there's one car per family, but that's the car that Papa has to take to work. So the children have no way to get to any social activities. They sit out there in the middle of nothing. And nobody cares, any other children, that are in desperate need of help. Children who have been confined to their rural areas with nothing to do but play in the dirt, no constructive toys. They don't know what it is to play with anyone else, but their own brothers and sisters. So these children start school not understanding what is expected of them in which these families live. Is it dilapidated? Most of the homes are not large enough for the size of the family. There's nothing unusual about families that have four and five children sleeping in one bed. It's no wonder that when they get up and go to school the next morning, they're a little too tired to keep up. They are your dropouts. They're the ones that end up without jobs. They're the ones that end up on the welfare rolls. Many times in making home visits in the area, I found homes that had no doors or windows, no bathrooms. So all of these things that are basic to you and me, they have never seen or heard of. But if by their differences and by their lack of preparedness, they are going to be segregated. They are not going to catch up. They are not going to be the same. And they need to be the same. They deserve to be the same. It's Jim Vestal, photographer for the Telegram Tribune. I remember Poncho and the Head Start program back in the summer of 1965. Head Start, when it first came to town, really didn't mean anything to me and I'm sure it meant nothing to anyone else. It was new and the southern part of San Luis Obispo County has always been known as a migrant area, even back to the Farm Security Agency. That was in 1936, 30 years have passed and still in the same area, the same problem exists. The same migrant people and they're below average. They're substandard only because they've had no formal education. They have no way of getting out. Poncho will at least have a chance to get out. Okay, now watch this. I'm Dr. Tibbs, one of the doctors who see children in the Head Start program. Get dressed. Okay Poncho, you're next. Come on. Well, you look a lot different this year, don't you? You can hop up there. Last year he would just sit on the edge of a table and you wouldn't do very much of anything, huh? You look a lot better this year. Now let's look at your ear first, all right? That's the boy. This ear looks clean. Did you clean your ears this morning? Did you wash it? Yeah. Let's see your teeth. Did you wash your teeth this morning? Let's see the ones in the back. I'll take a big breath, go. And again. That's right. All right, Poncho, lie down. Now look right up toward the ceiling. Can you see the sky up there? I'll look down the side first. All right, look up here in the sky. All right, very good. I saw Poncho for the first time. He was interested in absolutely nothing that was going on around him. This is quite abnormal for a five-year-old boy. You can hardly get a five-year-old to stand still for a picture. In the medical photographs that we took at the time, he has a rather bloated appearance of his face and his neck. He's a little bit sway-backed. He's pot belly. These are all characteristics of a youngster who had a thyroid deficiency or cretinism. We immediately began thyroid hormone as replacement. His progress has given us all a good bit of indication that Poncho, instead of being dependent on society, would most likely be capable of making some contribution to it. Now, you look right over there, Poncho. Right over there at that file. Your eye, way on the inside. That's right. See, that looks just fine. Now, let's look on his side. Look at that fellow over there. That's right. And both his eyes seem perfectly normal. All right, Poncho. Let's look at the eye chart with Mrs. Bird. Can you see this chart up, Poncho? I'll cover your eyes with one hand. Tell me what I'm pointing at. On just a very short period of time, his vocabulary progressed. He's essentially gone from the toddler stage to the school age in about 18 months. Good. Very good. Take your shirts and go get dressed. Very good. All right, Rachel, you're next. Hop up here. That's a big girl. You can bring your doll. That's fine. Hop right up here. That's a big girl. That was certainly made possible. A completely new and better life for many children, not alone Poncho. In most every community, there are children who have never had any form of contact with medical care, or perhaps even knowing that such things existed. I've seen children with visual problems, cataracts, heart problems. If these youngsters are going to be able to compete for just the necessities of life if they don't have good health, they're already at a tremendous disadvantage. In Poncho's case, true, he made a dramatic improvement on medication, but it wasn't just simply the medicines alone that allowed him to do this. It was the continued exposure to a very stimulating experience. For your nose pretty lady, you've got a ring on your nose pretty lady. I'm Henry Greenin, second-year Head Start teacher. With most of the children that came into our Head Start Center, the main problem we had in the beginning was to kind of break them out of isolation to bring them into groups where they would respond. Somebody built a dog's nose. Poor dog. They're not a kitty cat. You scare the poor dog as she'll fall down. Look what she did to the poor dog. He'll put his head back on. Look at his ears. See his ears sticking up in the... Where's your other coin? Hey Poncho. Poncho. When Poncho first came into Head Start, and after medication started and the physical development started to correct itself, the child then still had a terrific emotional and psychological change to go through. Hey Poncho, do you want to make something with the clay? Here, you guys go ahead and make your monster. And I'll see if I can get Poncho to make something, okay? Okay? Hey Tiger. Do you like to make something with the clay? Huh? Do you think it'd be kind of fun to make something with the clay? Okay. Would you like to? What would you like to make? Monster. A monster? Make a monster too? Okay. Let's see if we can get some clay out there. Find some monster clay. Where's the monster clay? Is that monster clay? Like his head. Should we use that for his head? Okay. Put his head right there. We would work with the child individually. Get the child interested in, we'll say, clay. Something they can do with their hands and pound and it doesn't break easily. These children are limited greatly in the experiences they've had in life in general. Drawing with crayons, working their small muscles with their hands. They're just so many little things they've never had an opportunity to do. Okay. Put the shoe on. Right there. Sit it on their right foot. Hey Sylvia, look what Poncho made. Come here and see the monster. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk. The child is slowly learning acceptance now from his friends and recognition. And then from this situation where the child is being accepted by his peers and then we try larger group situations. There it is. It is something in there. That's my finger. How do you know so much? A door. Poncho, do you want to hear a story? Who else wants to hear a story? Me. You want to really hear a story? How many people want to hear a story? Want to hear a story later? Poncho, would you bring me the story book, please? Would you get that book for me? Come on, Ed, you can sit down and listen to the story. That's it, boy. You sit down right here. Sit down right here. Okay, you guys, what kind of a story would you like to hear? I know a neat story in here. Can I read the neat story? This story? Okay, this is called the sea shore. You can dig in the sand and build castles and dams. You can catch little crabs if you're quick. You can wiggle your toes in the cool little waves. And there's the way to get the crabs. They're putting shells in their pail. Remember when we went to the beach and we got shells? We put them up to our ears to listen. Huh? Everybody put a shell up your ear and listen. Hope your hands real tight. Listen to the sea now. When the teacher of Wooden locks Poncho just sat and he did nothing to the fact that these children were carrying up this fire engine and slowly they were throwing the thing all around the room. He looked around, he was bewildered. It was all too much for him. A happy story to be able to turn and say there's Poncho. Let's fill up Poncho's pail. Hold your pail out there. Everybody fill up Poncho's pail. Still hold it? Is it heavy? How do you swim? All of a sudden I see a great big ish coming after us. I'll swim for sure. That's who it is. It's Superman. Listen. What's a Batman song sound like? Where's Batman? Is Batman fly? Show me where Batman is in the sky. I don't see Batman up there. Where's Batman in the sky? There's Batman. And Superman. Where's Robin? Where's Poncho? There he is. Right there. During the summer we took numerous nature walks with the children. And on these first nature walks there had to be quite a bit of direction to show these children what there was out there. And so we spent a lot of time just stopping, looking for wild flowers and getting down on our hands and knees and looking for bugs. The isolated, envron child to just a vivacious enthusiastic child completely full of wonderment. The children I want my children to be completely alive with life and loving life and wanting life is giving everybody a chance to live and to give each person a real choice in life rather than I'm what I am because of what I've been forced into being but I am what I am because that's what I want to be.