Head Start, a federal program to help poor children excel in school, is struggling to pay teachers adequately yet has rewarded a local director $200,000 in pay and benefits, a disparity that some say shortchanges kids.

Methodology
The Department of Health and Human Services doesn't list organizations by the size of Head Start grants. The San Antonio Express-News turned to another government source, the Federal Audit Clearinghouse, and downloaded a list of the top Head Start nonprofit grantees in the United States for fiscal year ending in 2001, the most complete period available. That information is available at harvester.census.gov/sac/.
The newspaper then gathered tax forms for the top organizations. The forms were obtained from the nonprofits, the Internal Revenue Service, and Philanthropic Research, Inc., a nonprofit entity that collects tax documents for thousands of groups and makes them available on the Internet at guidestar.org. The service is free.

Incomplete tax forms and missing years created some gaps in the review. For example, most groups have fiscal years that begin in 2001 and end in 2002, but some didn't report their time periods and could go by the 2001 calendar year.

Head Start, founded in 1965 during President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty, gives money to groups across the country to carry out a popular mission of educating low-income children before they enter kindergarten.

But in the spirit of giving communities a say in running local programs, Head Start imposes few limits on how local programs pay their executive directors and CEOs.

The result is a growing gap in pay that funnels tax dollars to a handful of Head Start leaders at the expense of impoverished teachers - and the children they serve.