Original Source | The Oregonian
By David Sarasohn, Sunday December 12, 2010

You could say that Dick Alexander got to the issue of early childhood education from the other direction.

At the beginning, it wasn't that he was drawn, as a number of Head Start supporters are, by the vision of 4-year-olds entitled to a better shot, and warm images of picture books with cookies and milk.

He started out way down the line from that.

Alexander, a conservative Republican businessman, started out on the Citizens Crime Commission, wondering "why we were locking up so many young people in Oregon." After several months of research, he remembers, "In our judgment, the best way to reverse the likelihood was through early childhood education."

It's actually not a unique insight; it's why 5,000 law enforcement professionals across the country belong to Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, arguing to their local governments that crime-fighting is not just a matter of more cells and bigger guns, but has a lot to do with teaching kids to count before counting becomes a matter of 20 years to life.

"We think about this being a children's issue," Alexander says. "But it's actually about the kind of adults they become."

And Alexander, retired founder of Viking Industries and former chairman of Associated Oregon Industries, the state business federation, has been spending a lot of time working on the kind of adults that kids become. For the past several sessions of the Legislature, as part of a group called the Leaders Panel, he's been going down to Salem to lobby for Head Start, to make the kinds of arguments that advocates with finger-painting stains on their outfits don't usually make.

"Our mission is not to pound on desks," he says. "It's simply to share the research.

"We've got to do something, regardless of the economy, or at the other end, the social-costs end, it will just get too big."

Alexander and the Leaders Panel have had some success in making their case. They had a successful session in 2001, with the once and future Gov. John Kitzhaber -- although in the following five special sessions their gains were gutted. In 2007, Head Start picked up $30 million in new state funding, and in the 2009 session -- when every program director and every legislator were looking under the cushions for spare change -- the Legislature actually found another $1 million for Early Head Start, a program to prepare younger kids.

Head Start people think Alexander's advocacy has had something to do with that.

"He has been crucial," says Ron Herndon, head of Albina Head Start in Portland and board chairman of the National Head Start Association. "The only word I can use to describe him and his advocacy for Head Start is 'magnificent.' I was shocked to see how effective he was in session after session, and he never quits.

"I told him I've only seen one other person outside the early childhood community who has mastered the literature and could talk about it that way: Bill Clinton."

In the Head Start world, praise can be written in no brighter crayon.

Last month, the Oregon Head Start Association created a scholarship in honor of Alexander, a $2,000 award for higher education to the parent of an Early Head Start student. The Associated Oregon Industries foundation will decide soon on joining the effort.

The commendation marks an educational process that Alexander has experienced himself.

"When I first went down (to Salem) several years ago, I would run into members who said -- and that was my position a few years ago -- it was the parents' responsibility," Alexander recalls. "I say I agree, but when the parents fail, society pays for it.

"In many homes, where children have little stimulation and few books read to them, they come out of that preparation way behind. Unless we focus more on that child zero to five, we're missing a wonderful opportunity to change the way that child develops."

And even if you start out with the likely crime forecasts and social-cost projections, eventually you get back to the kids, partly because watching a Head Start session is invariably more heartening than watching a legislative session.

"I'm always inspired," Alexander says. "I'm so impressed with the kids. You realize why you're doing this."

That, and, of course, the research.