Low-income families often can’t afford the services they need to set their young children up for success. For over six decades Head Start has been giving children aged 0-5 and their families access to education, healthcare and social services.
The program serves about 5,400 children in San Diego County, according to Rita Palet, the Executive Director of Early Education Programs and Services at the County Office of Education. Families who qualify are low-income in accordance with federal poverty guidelines. For example, a family of four which makes $33,000 a year. Children in foster care, on food stamps or who are experiencing homelessness are automatically eligible.
But a proposed federal reform could make it harder for children experiencing homelessness to enter the program. Because of that, Palet said she’s worried it would be harder for families already struggling to exit homelessness if they can’t enter a Head Start program.
“What would happen in San Diego alone is, I’m concerned there’d be more homeless,” Palet said. “There’d be less services. There’d be less supports for our youngest learners. And we don’t have a system in place to pick up those pieces.”
The Trump administration says the proposal would eliminate regulations to save on administrative costs, which they said would increase the number of people in the program nationwide by up to 236,000. In 2024, Head Start served 715,873 children and pregnant women.
But Barbara Duffield said even if there are more spots, children experiencing homelessness won’t be able to access them. Duffield is the Executive Director of SchoolHouse Connections, a nationwide homeless advocacy group for children.
“Even if it did create more slots, families who are homeless would not be getting them because they couldn't prove their homelessness,” she said. “There would be no way to prioritize them.”
That’s because some of the regulations proposed to be eliminated are currently in place to recruit families experiencing homelessness and reserve program spots for them.
Executive Director of Head Start California Melanee Cottrill said the new plan would also require families to provide documents proving they are homeless.
“We know for a family living in a shelter that they could do that,” Cottrill said. “But that's really hard for a family who, say, just lost their house in a fire and has nothing. Or a family who's living in an RV and again has nothing but that RV, right? How do you prove a negative?”
Currently, families can self-declare that they are experiencing homelessness without needing to provide formal documentation from a shelter, hospital, school or similar agency.
In an email statement to KPBS, the U-S Administration for Children and Families said eliminating a family’s ability to self declare would “uphold program integrity and accountability for taxpayers.”
It also said children experiencing homelessness would still be able to receive services before their homeless status is verified, as long as it’s within a “reasonable time.”
At least one local provider is not all that concerned about the proposal. Yolanda Perez is the Executive Director of All Kids Academy in East San Diego County.
“The preamble made to these regulations that came out said that the intent is not to make Head Start go away, it's to make Head Start expand,” Perez said. “And the way that they're doing that is by preserving federal dollars by lowering the standards. So, that's all they're saying.”
Perez said the proposal would give more flexibility and decision making to the states. And that’s why she’s not worried, because she thinks California will prioritize high standards for early education.
But she is concerned that the new guidelines would remove additional training for teachers.
“That's a problem for me because my teachers need ongoing professional development training on how to identify special needs, on how to work with families from children experiencing homelessness.”
The reform would also remove standards that prioritize children with disabilities, caps on teacher to student ratios, and it would prohibit any language but English to be used in the classroom.
The public comment period for the proposed reform ends on October 6. Rita Palet with the County Office of Education said local Head Start administrators and other community agencies have told her they are preparing their comments to support some of the current regulations.
Most of the people we spoke with said they are worried that removing so many of those regulations would lower the overall quality of Head Start.
"It's eliminating tools,” Palet said. “It's providing more barriers for those who are already struggling."
