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  Last Updated on 07/13/2018

Proposal would shrink Head Start, some fear

 

Restructuring plan would give states more control over funding
by Michael Collins, Detroit News and Scripps Howard, June 15, 2003

Danielle Harper has watched in amazement as her 5-year-old son, David, discovers the joys of learning.

He not only recognizes letters of the alphabet, but he also associates them with his everyday life. "M" stands for McDonald's; "I" means ice cream.

He may not know the words, but when she reads certain books to him, he knows how the story corresponds to the pictures on the page. "You can skip pages, and he's right in sync with whatever is on the page," the proud mother says.

Harper, of Cincinnati, credits her son's success to his participation in Head Start, a federal program that provides education, health and nutrition services to 900,000 needy preschool children and their families across the country.

But while Harper and other Head Start parents offer personal testimonials about the program's benefits, a battle is brewing in Congress over the future of the 38-year-old program.

A proposed change in the way the federal government funds Head Start has galvanized the program's supporters, who say it could lead to the closure of Head Start centers and mean fewer services for thousands of disadvantaged children.

The restructuring "would decimate the Head Start program as we know it," said Barbara Haxton, executive director of the Ohio Head Start Association.

She said the program had never faced such a challenge.

Under the proposed change, a handful of states would be able to coordinate their early childhood programs with Head Start. Funding would no longer flow directly from the federal government to the agencies that provide Head Start services. Instead, the money would go to the states, which would decide how it would be spent.

Only eight states -- Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Kentucky, Georgia, New York, North Carolina and Ohio -- would be eligible initially. States that are interested would have to apply to participate in the demonstration project and agree to either maintain or increase funding for early childhood programs.

The bill, approved Thursday by the House Education and Workforce subcommittee on education reform, now goes to the full committee. Head Start is up for reauthorization, meaning Congress and the president can rewrite the bill.

Advocates of the bill say the goal is to reduce the "readiness gap" that still exists between Head Start children and their more affluent peers. They point to studies showing that children who graduate from Head Start lag behind other children in crucial knowledge areas, such as letter and number recognition, pre-reading understanding and shape and color recognition.

The restructuring would strengthen the academic components of the program and allow it to serve as many as 10,000 additional children across the country, proponents say. The bill also would boost Head Start funding by $202 million above this year's $6.7 billion.

"The simple truth is that children in Head Start are learning, but they aren't learning as much as they deserve to be learning," said Rep. Michael Castle, R-Del., the bill's sponsor. "... The current system is giving these children a head start, but it isn't giving them the best start possible."

Head Start supporters counter that the studies cited by the proponents of change are based on old data and don't reflect the program's success.

As for claims that the restructuring would improve services, Head Start officials say there is no guarantee that states would direct the money to local centers or that states would maintain the high performance standards that the program currently must meet.

For parents like Harper, who worries that her son's Head Start center will have to close, what matters most is that children continue to learn.

"Can the government personally guarantee me that my son's education will not suffer?" she asked.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

 

 

 

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