McALLEN — The Hidalgo County Head Start Program outdoor learning project originally slated to get underway in 2021 appears to once again be back on track, albeit with a significantly reduced budget.
The program’s $5.5 million Discovery Park project was originally billed as an innovative development combining natural features of the large lot behind Head Start’s McAllen offices with amenities like outdoor classrooms and infrastructure to shuttle students from centers across the county to the location.
Then-director Teresa Flores said in May of 2021 that she expected the project to get underway that year.
Things did not go that smoothly.
Current program Executive Director Irma Peña told The Monitor this month that the project faced a variety of challenges. It’s spent much of the past year-and-a-half in a sort of limbo.
First, Peña said, Hidalgo County Head Start and the county cut the project’s budget down to about $2.8 million, redirecting a good chunk of the original $5.5 million in federal funds to personnel.
“This entity and the county of Hidalgo requested for the previous administrator to go back to the Office of Head Start on whether they could release some of that money to be issued to the staff,” Peña said. “That was mostly for COVID-related support and these types of things, so that’s what they did then.”
After the budget cut, Peña said the project’s contractor backed out.
“So they had to go back to square one,” she said.
Head Start went through a separation with former director Flores in September of last year.
The organization’s policy council members put Peña in charge not long after, and indicated to her that they weren’t so sure about continuing with the project.
Peña said the council asked her about rerouting the funds to outdoor learning facilities at individual centers across the county.
“I contacted the Office of Head Start, but the problem was if we were going to submit a change of scope, we would not have met the deadline,” she said. “So that means we would return the $2.8 million to be able to do this. So I came back to the board and said this was not an option.”
Faced with the option of either scrapping the project or moving ahead with it in more or less its original form, the council opted to forge on with the development.
At a meeting earlier this month, the group’s policy council was briefed by members of the project’s design team.
“That was a critical piece,” Peña said.
Completion is expected by January of next year, materials presented to the council say.
Peña told the council she doesn’t expect the delay to jeopardize funding for the project. She could not say exactly what features have been cut from the project because of the decrease in funding.
A rendering shown to the council still depicts it as, essentially, a large outdoor learning space with a parking lot.
