The garage doors that once opened for the Missouri State Emissions Testing Station on West Florissant are gone, replaced by floor to ceiling windows. There are no concrete bays with cars chugging out exhaust, but rather classrooms filled with baby cribs, toddler-sized desks and brightly colored age-appropriate toys. The six months of planning, design and construction are over.
The YWCA Bessie T. Draper Early Head Start and Pregnant Women’s Center, 4642 W. Florissant Ave., now a reality, was a labor of love from the beginning.
Aware of the need for services for infants and toddlers in this neighborhood along I-70, and bolstered with research showing a high rate of no or inadequate pre-natal care and infant mortality, YWCA Head Start Director Stacy Johnson successfully applied to the national Head Start office for the funding to open and operate the center. It will serve pregnant women and children up to age three from income-eligible families.
Created during President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in 1964, Head Start was designed to help break the cycle of poverty, providing preschool children of low-income families with a comprehensive program to meet their emotional, social, health, nutritional and psychological needs.
“The magnitude of the impact of this center on this neighborhood and these families will last a lifetime,” Johnson said. “Even those who don’t have much deserve good things.”
The Draper Early Head Start Center is named for national Head Start pioneer Bessie T. Draper, the late mother of Missouri Supreme Court Justice George W. Draper III. Bessie Draper joined Head Start in Washington, D.C., in 1966 as the first parent-program specialist. She strongly believed that parents should be full partners in the design and delivery of services, a philosophy that was alien in much of education in those days, and one that remains a pillar of the Head Start policy today.
Justice Draper; his wife, St. Louis County Circuit Court Judge Judy Draper; and their daughter, Chelsea Draper, an assistant attorney general of the State of Missouri, were honored guests at the ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday, April 13, along with former state Rep. Betty Thompson.
Justice Draper spoke of his mother’s passion for Head Start, saying that she flew all over the nation to improve the lives of low-income families “no matter what color they were,” serving families in Appalachia as well as in urban areas. “Mother would be proud to know you are taking care of pregnant women,” Justice Draper said in reference to the pre-natal services offered both in the center and in the home. “This is an honor to our family and to her work showing that parents are important in all aspects of a child’s development.”
Touring the new facility, Justice Draper and his family paused before a commemorative photo wall. One photo showed both his parents, Bessie Draper and her husband, George W. Draper II, on the campus of Howard University, where he graduated law school in the early 1940s. The elder Draper went on to become the first African American to serve as a St. Louis Circuit Court chief trial attorney, under Thomas Eagleton.
In another photograph, Bessie Draper is wearing a single strand of pearls, a necklace that would be handed down to Chelsea and one she would wear to the ceremony honoring her grandmother. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Chelsea, a third-generation Draper, is also a third-generation public servant and attorney, personifying the importance of parents (and grandparents) in a child’s life – just as Bessie T. Draper promised all those years ago.
“Stacy and her team worked very hard to make this dream come true,” YWCA CEO Adrian Bracy said, “for the parents and children of this community.”
For more information, call (314) 427-4940 or visit www.ywcastlouis.org.
Laurie Waters is marketing and communications manager for YWCA Metro St. Louis.
