For 60 years, Head Start, a program designed to support the nation’s youngest and most economically challenged children, “has given children and parents a real opportunity,” U.S. Sen. Jack Reed said outside the Cranston Child Development Center Wednesday.
But now a recently leaked document from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) suggests Head Start, which falls under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), could see its funding cut entirely as part of an agency reorganization.
The prospect of eliminating Head Start funding surfaced in a leaked, 64-page budget document first shared by Inside Medicine, a Substack-hosted publication, and later verified by the Washington Post and other major news outlets. The document comprises President Donald Trump’s suggestions for the HHS budget in the fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1.
“Our job in government is to create opportunities, not to deny it,” Reed told the crowd gathered. “We know that investing in early education for children, especially comprehensive, high-quality Head Start, pays for itself many times.”
Since its inception, the program started under President Lyndon B. Johnson as part of larger anti-poverty initiatives has served newborns through 5-year-olds, subsidizing child care, preschool and other early learning supports for families with incomes up to the poverty line. The Early Head Start program also offers services to pregnant women. Enrollment data from 2023 showed 1,610 Rhode Island kids in Head Start, and 675 kids in Early Head Start.
“The whole premise of Head Start is to have children going into kindergarten equally with children that have parents who can afford to pay for child care or send them to private schools,” said Stacy Del Vicario, vice president of child development at the Comprehensive Community Action Program (CCAP), the parent organization of the Cranston center, in an interview after the press event.
HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
According to the leaked document, Trump’s proposed HHS budget “does not fund Head Start. This elimination is consistent with the Administration’s goal of returning education to the States and increasing parental choice. The Federal government should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations, and performance standards for any form of education.”
“Losing this program would make it so that we’d have hundreds of thousands of children that will not have access to early child care, which means that then you have parents that aren’t able to work,” Del Vicario said. “Because how are you affording child care?”
It’s possible that Trump’s budget proposal might not inform the congressional budget at all — it serves more as an executive branch wishlist, rather than a concrete spending plan. But since Trump took office, Rhode Island’s congressional delegates have hosted a flurry of press conferences designed to preempt and publicize the potential and ongoing threats to certain spending programs.
On Wednesday, it was Reed alone who came to Cranston to speak in defense of the program, which received around $12 billion in fiscal year 2024. Surrounded by Head Start providers and a few parents, Reed emphasized the program as a means of preparing kids for kindergarten and elementary school regardless of their background. The program, the senator said, makes “school readiness…a family affair.”
Losing this program would make it so that we’d have hundreds of thousands of children that will not have access to early child care, which means that then you have parents that aren’t able to work. Because how are you affording child care?
“Now is the time to raise our voices and push back against these proposals that will undermine one of the most effective programs we have for children,” Reed said. “The Trump administration says it wants to empower parents and send education to local communities. But Head Start is already a local program.”
Storm Brooks is a mother of two boys who attended Head Start and Early Head Start at the Cranston Center.
“I wanted to start off the speech by mentioning how unexpected life is,” Brooks told the crowd, then recounted how her finances turned upside down when the pandemic hit in 2020.
Head Start allowed her young boys in “a trusted facility that not only meets my financial needs, but also gives me the surety that my children are safe, protected and cared for by trained professionals,” Brooks said. She added that her kids have shown improvements in cognition, school and sociability since they entered the program.
Reed zoomed out a bit further to consider Head Start as a way to build up young minds for future accomplishments. “If you don’t have that stimulation as a child, you won’t develop your full potential, and you won’t be able to give as much as you could to this country,” he said.
Brooks offered a more specific example: a mother of two girls, she often sees bringing her kids to the Cranston center.
“I see her Uber and Lyft her way here every morning and every afternoon, transferring her car seats to and fro from the building, making sure that her children get here safely,” Brooks said, adding that she wonders what this mother would do without Head Start.
“How much more difficult would it be for her to save up to have that vehicle for her children?” Brooks said. “Because of Head Start, that mother is out working today to be able to do just that.”
While the Head Start funding cuts may be hypothetical at the moment, the closure of regional Head Start offices is not. On April 3, Head Start providers nationwide received an email from the HHS’s Administration for Children and Families that five regional offices — Boston, New York, Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco — would be closed and consolidated starting on April 1.
“We were very caught off guard. Probably not as much as they were, because they literally walked to work and then it wasn’t available,” Del Vicario said of the people working in the shuttered Head Start offices.
‘Not just babysitting’
Proponents of Head Start say the program has long been underfunded at both the state and federal levels, leaving a limited number of eligibility slots for families.
Del Vicario has worked in Rhode Island Head Start for 16 years, but said she has never seen cuts of the same magnitude as the ones in the OMB proposal. Rhode Island’s delegation has “always been so forward thinking with early childhood,” she said, but added that many states are not so lucky.
“There are a lot of states and people out there, unfortunately, that don’t realize that early childhood is not just babysitting or not just putting a kid in a rocking chair,” Del Vicario said.
But she also acknowledged that people who aren’t raising young children might be unaware of the inner workings of the program, which she described as being tailored to “community needs,” offering a comprehensive spectrum of child care from between four and six hours of classroom time plus access to social workers, mental health supports, nutritionists, nurses and more.
CCAP’s Head Start grants run on a five-year cycle, Del Vicario said, with the most recent starting in November 2024. So far the organization’s funding has not been imperiled. But the closure of the regional office is troubling, she said, because it’s become harder to access information. Federal contacts for technical assistance and training have remained intact, Del Vicario said, and they’ve been helpful in communicating what they know about the program’s status.
Other questions remain unanswered.
“Who do we report into? Who do we turn our grants into? Who do we ask questions?” Del Vicario wondered. “Because we really haven’t been given any names yet. They’ve given us this generic email kind of thing.”
The lack of higher-up oversight has introduced concerns about grant compliance, Del Vicario said, as providers are still being monitored.
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
