A GROUP OF COMMITTED ACTIVISTS

The nucleus of a constituency for the program was a group of educational activists who had been committed to early childhood education since the 1950s. This group included Jane Paine, consultant to the St. Louis-based Danforth Foundation, and Carolyn Losos, a former teacher later named to chair the Commissioner's Committee on Parents As Teachers.

In 1975 the first in a series of statewide conferences was held to promote public awareness of and develop broad support for parent education and, at the same time, to make it clear that such educational initiatives were at the top of Governor Bond's list of priorities. After the conference and as a result of the interest it generated, two legislators introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to fund screening of children and to authorize parent-child programs for three- and four-year-olds. It was the first of several measures to clear the House, only to be subsequently rejected in the Senate.

Opponents of the legislation regarded themselves as defenders of parents' right to raise their children free of government intervention. Their efforts were backed by groups outside the state. Supporters of the Bond-backed legislation recall witnesses characterizing it as a "Communist plot to take control of the minds of children."

Prevention legislation, so called because it was designed to prevent more costly and less effective remedial training for educationally delayed children, was also defeated, but that did not deter House supporters. A prevention bill was offered in every session of the legislature in the 1970s, even after Bond was defeated in 1976. These bills consistently lost in the Senate.