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I understand that of the hard-core unemployed or under employed in the poverty areas of Atlanta, that somewhere between 95 and 98% are women who are heads of households and that these female heads of household each have an average of four dependent children. A large part of the employment efforts directed by Federal, State and local sources have been aimed at job placement of these hard-core unemployed or under employed. Present efforts are being made toward prevocational education and training and then job development and placement. This presumes that once these people are placed on·jeb,s,they will be able to become assimulated into the main s t re am of production at a living wage . Once the person is placed into a job such person has to provide her own r e sources for the care of h e r dependent children. Such citiz en faced with ina de quat e income, poor living conditions in a poor ar e a makes h er job t r aining and placement doomed to failure. I f efforts to pla c e f ema l e h e ads of household into profitabl e j obs should be a success there must firs t b e made provis ion for the c are of the youngs t ers in pr oper and a ccept ab le conditions . to ~accomondate some 75 0 children. EOA now operates Day Care Cent ers Such Day Care Centers are not loc ated in the highly concentrated ghetto populated areas. EOA f unded centers only scratch the surface of the real need of such accomodation. I feel that a major effort with Federal financing needs to be provided to establish good child care centers so that female heads of households can be relieved of this cost and they can then undertake to provide wi th income from their jobs enough to cover expenses of living and support of their homes. If they must earn enough to support their homes and pay for their childrens day care, they will never m:ake it. The providing �-2- of Day Care at no cost would relieve the strain of mothers to the point where they could maintain themselves and their families in an acceptable home atmospher e . Such Day Care Centers will need to be operated on a six -day week with hours from 7 A.M. or earlier until late in the evenings which to permit the mother to enter the children in the Day Care Centers before work and to receive the children after completion of h e r day's work. This will have another very desirable effect if Day Care Center conditions were made to accomodate the children in a good atmosphere with food, clean clothing, sanitation, etc. so that the children would come to realize a desirabl e standard of living and be motivated in th eir very early years toward the de si r ability of self betterment and the ne e d f or a level of education t h at would r e sult in the el evation o f th ems e lves f rom the type o f life into which they were born and first accustomed. I have s een the e ffects of this in the Country of Venequela where the children were taken at an a ge of about two years and were provide d a kinder garten or day care t ype f acility f r om ear ly morning to late eve ning of e ach day of the week ex cept Sunday. Th ese children who came from homes which had dirt floors , no s ani tation , i mprop er food habits , with par ents with l ittl e or no education entere d i n t o and le a rne d a new way o f l i fe which t he y appre c i a te d and en joyed . Upon returni ng to t h eir homes i n t he eveni ngs the y saw t he gre at cont r a st betwe en th e ir manner of living at h ome and their manne r o f livi ng in the day c are c en te r. Th ey voiced their dis satisfac tion with traditional plight of t hei r pa r ent s and demande d th e bet t e r thing s of l i fe. Thi s had an effect on t he pa r ent s and in many cases c aused t he par ent s to make a r eal effort to i mprove their homes and ma nne r of l iving i n or der t o be tt e r sat is fy the chi l dr e n. these pre - s chool ye a r s of the chil dr en t hey t hems elves de te rmi ne d to have a bet ter life t ha n did their pare nts. Thi s motiva tion continue d into their In �-3- elementary school age and then on into their high school years. on into college. Many continued This definitely would not have happened had they not been thoroughly indoctrinated into a better way of life during the very early years of their lives. As a result of these programs, Venequela now have a fast growing middle class element in its population whereas previously it had only two classes the very poor and the very rich. I believe that the main approach to solving these social problems should be aimed at the early years of this large group of socially depressed children. We will never succeed by directing major attention to the adolescents and adulcs who were born into and raised in poverty, in slums of rural and urban areas and because of such factors will be most difficult, if not impossible to educate, motivate and change into fully self-supporting masses. �