Joyce Walker Bennett wanted to do something special when she retired in 2021 from Monongalia County Schools.
Bennett spent 25 years as a social worker with the school district’s Head Start program, counseling young moms and their families in households that, more often than not, were economically needy.
“I can’t stop caring, even though I’m quitting work,” she said then.
So, she put a cookbook together and added her primer of life lessons to recipes.
There were observations on why the burgers you fry up at home are always going to be more tasty, and less expensive, than the ones you might grab at the drive-through.
And how one can never go wrong, socially, by sending a thank you card, handwritten.
“These are things I would have wanted someone to tell me when I was starting out,” said Bennett, the mother of two grown children.
It wasn’t immediately clear Monday if the national story of Head Start – the federally funded program came into existence in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty initiatives – would continue being told.
That’s because of President Donald Trump’s memo on the freezing of federal grants which could have affected Head Start and countless other programs bankrolled by government dollars.
Trump’s budget office on Wednesday rescinded that memo, however.
Said document and mission to review such programs and how they pertain to the governing philosophy of the White House prompted uncertainty – and the first legal wranglings a bevy of lawsuits questioning its legality.
For Norma Gaines, who is the district’s director of federal programs, it was a reminder of just how pronounced those funds from Washington, D.C. are – when it comes to bankrolling the business of human service and outreach, as pertained to a school district based in Morgantown.
“I was worried,” Gaines said. “That it’s a temporary stay, still worries me.”
Along with Head Start, federal grants and outlays in the district prop up Title I, school lunches and other particulars of special education programming.
Programs, she said, staffed by people who care and even see what they do as a calling.
“Lots of kids, lots of families,” she said.
“We’re just gonna have to wait and see what eventually happens.”
