April 14, 2025 | Issue #15 | | Support of the Monday Morning Update | | For 2025 please consider a donation to help support delivery of the Monday Morning Update to your email every week by 5:30am. Our distribution of this update is over 10,000 and growing. Your consideration is greatly appreciated. Thank you! | |
HEAD START UNDER ATTACK - NOT ON OUR WATCH
by Denyne Micheletti, CEO Thriving Families CA (TFC)
On Friday, it was announced that The Trump administration is considering a budget proposal that would zero out funding for Head Start.
Although this proposed threat has been here ever since Trumps' administration froze federal grants in February but was quickly reversed, Head Start programs have been operating in a state of fear. This fear has been growing with the layoffs of government staff who administer Head Start. To date, at least five of the Administration for Children and Families' (ACF) regional offices in Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and New York, which serve 23 states and territories have closed including our Region IX.
What does the threat mean to California and the children and families helped by Head Start? If Head Start is defunded, it means a total of 80,345 infants, toddlers and preschoolers desperately needing support to become ready for school will lose access to programs. It means that 1,881 Head Start centers will cease to exist. It means that 26,681 Head Start staff will lose their jobs.
This federally funded program created during the Lyndon B. Johnson "war on poverty" more than six decades ago has served more than 40 million children and their families. This two-generation program was designed to connect babies and toddlers to supports needed to enhance cognitive and langauge development as well as social-emotional support needed for success when entering school. Head Start was also designed to support parents with educational support, job training, child rearing and so much more.
According to Rachel Cauley, a spokeperson for the White Houce Office of Management and Budget, "No final funding decisions have been made."
Think you don't know anyone that has benefitted from this critical program? Think again. Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Dolores Huerta, Chris Rock, Sonia Sotomayerm and Shaquille O'Neal to reference a few.
Time is of the essence for all of us to contact our congressional representatives and oppose this cut to this vital program. In the coming days, we will be lifting up coordinated actions of advocates on the front lines in this fight.
Not on our watch. Not now. Not ever.
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