NOT CHARITY, BUT SURVIVAL:

In fast-growing Texas, businesses aid schools (Kris Axtman, 3/18/04, CS Monitor)

The classrooms are filled with new learning tools, walls are freshly painted, inside and out, and new playground equipment gleams in the late winter sun.

These recent improvements to His Place Day Care Center on the city's heavily Hispanic east side have come despite statewide education cutbacks. Where public funding is failing to support struggling preschools and kindergartens, local branches of companies such as Baker Hughes, ExxonMobil, and IBM are making a much needed entrance in this land of sandboxes and pint-size desks.

It's part of a growing realization by businesses that investment and involvement in early childhood development is crucial to their own success. The flurry of public-private cooperation is especially welcome in states with fast-growing young populations - of which Texas is the leader.

"It's just wonderful," says Hattie Robinson White, the day care's executive director. His Place Day Care Center has received more than $60,000 through an ExxonMobile program and volunteers from Baker Hughes pitched in to help paint the school. "More and more, we need corporate America to step up and say, 'We want to make an investment in the lives of children,' because they are going to be paying on one end or the other. This is their future workforce."

Democrats can keep arguing that the GOP only supports private remedies for education because of ideology, but businesses--which have to hire the products of public schools-- recognize that the system is failing.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 17, 2004 7:11 PM