I've always thought that the design on the site below would be an excellent kid-cat, and would lend itself to a Sunfish or Laser rig for simplicity and reuse. Start beginners on an easy and low power rig, update to sloop for more experienced kids. It looks very simple and inexpensive to build, in the spirit of the original Optimist pram. A sailing club could build a bunch of these on the cheap and voila, a pre-Hobie-16 age youngster cat sailing program. Get a couple of clubs to do it in a region and whole new thing could be born.

Awhile ago I posted a challenge for the designers that lurk around to come up with something like this, and nobody responded. But maybe because this existing boat might already be the ticket.

http://www.stevproj.com/SpecPurp.html - scroll down a bit, there's more than one design on the page.