Posted on March 21 2011 by Andrew Kelynack

Hunt back for Smart Start

RALEIGH — Two decades ago, Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt used his renowned political arm-twisting skills to get state lawmakers to support a pilot early-childhood program, then persuaded Republican leaders to spend more so all 100 counties had it by the time he left office in 2001.

Smart Start began in 1993 and became a model for other states. It provides health screenings, parent training, and high-quality child care to families so tens of thousands of additional children areready to learn when they reach kindergarten.

“We want to develop their brains. We want them to start school healthy and ready to learn,” Hunt said in a recent interview.

This year, the four-term governor is back as a private citizen pigeonholing legislators, full of his usual passion about education to defend the program against a new Republican majority that has suggested slashing its funding, scaling it back or even eliminating it.

In recent weeks, he has been meeting and phoning Republican leaders and talking up a new study about the program’s effectiveness. He is lending his political star power to a Legislative Building news conference Wednesday to highlight support for Smart Start from business leaders.

“I’m just trying to give them the facts, the information, and encourage them to do the right thing,” Hunt said. “In the last two weeks, I’ve been to the legislature more than I have in the 10 years since I was out of office.”

Legislative leaders seeking to close a $2.4 billion budget gap next year without new or temporary taxes have told budget writers to scrutinize Smart Start and More at Four, a preschool subsidy for at-risk children that was championed by Hunt successor Mike Easley. Though nothing has been settled, consolidating or merging the two programs, which receive more than $300 million annually from the state, is a potential outcome.

“Why should we keep duplicating services all the time? Some people like some facets of More at Four and think it would make a better fit with Smart Start,” said Rep. Harold Brubaker, a Randolph Republican who is senior chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Brubaker, who was speaker in the mid-1990s as Hunt negotiated for Smart Start as governor, renewed old ties by meeting with Hunt last week.

Hunt ‘hasn’t changed’

Hunt, 73, “hasn’t changed. He’s still the salesman personified,” Brubaker said. “He believes in his mission, and you’ve got to give him credit for that.”

Smart Start is administered by the statewide nonprofit N.C. Partnership for Children in Raleigh, but 77 local partnerships covering every county help decide how money is spent to help children from birth to 5 years old. State law requires that at least 10 percent of state funds be matched by outside contributions.

State funding for Smart Start peaked at $231 million during Hunt’s last year as governor and is now at $188 million. Gov. Beverly Perdue’s budget recommended another 5 percent cut. Democrats in charge of the legislature two years ago considered consolidating the two programs, but changing programs championed by Democratic governors proved difficult.

The conservative-leaning John W. Pope Civitas Institute has suggested Smart Start’s leaders are overpaid and wasting money. It rolled out a report last week that found nine people throughout Smart Start received total compensation of at least $100,000.

“Smart Start gets 90 percent of its funding from government, and unfortunately it uses a large part of that funding on salaries and benefits far more generous than those of the taxpayers who pay their salaries,” Civitas Institute’s president, Francis De Luca, said in a release.

Stephanie Fanjul, president of the N.C. Partnership for Children, said the report was misleading and was designed to distract from the issue of how best to prepare children for school. She said that Smart Start offices are audited often and that state law caps administrative spending.

Fanjul said Hunt’s efforts – he’s not getting paid – are helping teach more than 30 first-term Republicans in the legislature about how Smart Start got started.

“None of them were in the political world when Gov. Hunt moved this forward,” she said, adding that Smart Start boosters “feel really blessed that he’s helping tell the story.”

Hunt points to a new Duke study to quantify the effects of Smart Start and More at Four on student performance in third grade. Exposure to Smart Start and More at Four each equates to an additional two months of instruction, the report said.

Hunt said reviving old political relationships and building new ones is not about protecting his own legacy. He said it’s about reminding lawmakers why Smart Start is important to the state, like the University of North Carolina system, adding: “This is a North Carolina legacy.”

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