By Neil Offen

noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646

DURHAM -- More than 15,000 children under the age of 3 live in Durham County. More than 3,500 of them live in poverty.

A $3.3 million federal grant will bring myriad services that are desperately needed to 120 of those children, local officials said Tuesday.

The grant, part of the government's stimulus spending plan, will establish Durham's first-ever Early Head Start program. Early Head Start, established nationally in 1995, provides comprehensive child and family development services for low-income pregnant women and families with infants and toddlers ages birth to 3, both at home and in child care centers.

"We are thrilled to have this grant here," said Angie Welsh, president of the Board of Directors of Durham's Partnership for Children, the agency that received the funding. "All the services we and our partners provide really make a difference and there's a definite need in Durham for this kind of high-quality care."

There are Early Head Start programs in 29 counties across the state, including in Orange County, but Durham has been trying to get one since 1998, the last time funding was available.

The new program -- which should get off the ground within the next six months -- will begin with home visits and then spread to multiple day-care sites where "the highest-quality care will be offered," said Kate Irish, program and evaluation director for the partnership, which is part of the statewide Smart Start Initiative.

The program will work with existing child care sites but will also look at the possibility of creating new ones, particularly in East Durham, which has no top-ranked child care centers, officials pointed out.

Services will include "intensive interventions and a special commitment to homeless children and special-needs children," said Khari Garvin, director of the North Carolina Head Start State Collaboration Office. "These aren't 'at-risk' children," he said. "These are 'at-promise' children."

Overall, the state received $17 million in stimulus money to expand Early Head Start, around double what it gets now, with Durham getting the largest individual chunk. The $3.3 million is one of the largest grants ever to a first-time recipient.

"This is a remarkable achievement for Durham," Welsh said. "This is exciting and remarkable."

Working with the Chapel Hill Training and Outreach Project and Healthy Families Durham, the partnership is developing criteria for selecting the 120 children who get into the program, said Marsha Basloe, executive director of the partnership. While the grant is for two years, "our hope is if we develop an infrastructure now, make it excellent, that we will be able to build on this," she said.

"The idea would be to keep it going, because we think there will be an opportunity for additional funding after the grant runs out," she said. "I'm very, very hopeful of that."