I also know about Head Start from personal experience. 60 years ago, I was a Head Start child.
Locally, our Head Start organization is Miami Valley Child Development Centers. Like all Head Start organizations nationally, it offers early learning for children from 6 weeks to age 5, allowing many parents to work outside the home.
Importantly, MVCDC also supports the child’s family – helping them set and meet goals like going back to school, finding a better job, saving to buy a car or moving to safe housing.
Head Start serves families who need support the most. To be eligible, a mother of two children must earn under $26,650 annually. Notice I said “earn.” Over 70% of MVCDC families are working families. MVCDC also benefits employers. A mother couldn’t possibly work and pay for child care on this income.
There are troubling rumblings that the Trump administration and some in Congress want to eliminate Head Start. Doing so would be a travesty. For 60 years, Head Start has had enthusiastic bipartisan political support because its impact is so powerful.
According to the New York Times, a document was floated in the White House saying that Head Start uses a “radical” curriculum and gives preference to illegal immigrants. The claims are not true.
Visit any MVCDC or Head Start program, and you’ll see children mastering skills that get them ready for kindergarten. They’re learning and exploring through play, working in teams and practicing sharing.’
Thankfully, the most recent version of the Trump budget does not eliminate Head Start. But the budget process is long and winding. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposes eliminating the program.
Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman estimates that the return on investment in high-quality early education programs for young children is significant. In The Hill, he recently wrote, “The evidence is overwhelming: High-quality early childhood programs, especially those like Head Start that support both children and families, deliver lifelong benefits. They increase educational attainment, improve employment and health outcomes and even support marriage and stable families.”
Heckman concedes that Head Start can be improved, that it can be bureaucratic, but he doesn’t doubt the value. Neither do I – I’ve both experienced and seen the lasting impact.
Raising children is an overwhelming responsibility, and it is hard work. Every parent I’ve ever met wants the best for their child, but they don’t always know how to give their children what they need.
Maybe when they were growing up, no one read to them. Maybe their parents couldn’t afford to take them for wellness checks. Maybe no one ever explained that children’s brains develop the fastest in the first five years of life and that when children are talked to, played with, sung to, rocked and nurtured that their critical brain circuits are being built better and stronger.
Every year almost 3,000 young children and their families in the Miami Valley are being supported by MVCDC. If Head Start were to go away, those children and their families would lose so much – as would our entire community. MVCDC families don’t want to continue in poverty, and they certainly don’t wish that for their children. Head Start is the hand up they need. Just as it was for me.
Raised in West Dayton where his practice is concentrated, Dr. Alonzo Patterson III is a board-certified pediatrician and a fierce advocate for the education and well-being of our community’s children.
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