In the spring of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson announced the launch of a new initiative: Head Start, a program designed to support poor children’s readiness for kindergarten by not only offering them time in classrooms but by addressing their health and well-being and partnering with their families to improve their circumstances. Our nation responded to that vision. Just a few months later, communities across our Commonwealth and across the country welcomed children into Head Start centers. Sixty-one years later, 28 Head Start agencies across Massachusetts continue to uphold that vision – that vulnerable children deserve the highest quality early education and wraparound supports to grow and thrive.
The Head Start statute and regulations codified the early vision for the program and expanded it over time to serve children from birth until kindergarten. Now, that national commitment is at risk because of a recent proposal that would dismantle Head Start’s federal standards. In August, the Trump administration released a proposal to gut Head Start regulations and threaten the quality, scope, and services of Head Start. The proposed rule eliminates quality early learning standards; removes standards for critical wraparound services for children and families, including health and mental health services; reduces access and eligibility for children from families experiencing homelessness, children with disabilities, and foster children; and threatens learning outcomes for dual language learners.
A child cannot learn if she is hungry. A family cannot focus on school readiness if they are facing eviction. A teacher cannot meet a traumatized child’s needs if her classroom is too large, her training is inadequate, and she has no classroom supports. These facts have been the basis of Head Start’s design for 61 years, and now that design is at risk. The federal proposal is framed as reducing federal burden and giving local programs greater flexibility. Massachusetts Head Start programs welcome meaningful flexibility. We already design services around the needs of our communities. But rather than addressing the real challenges facing Head Start – including rising operating costs, workforce shortages, and years of inadequate funding – the proposal punishes programs, families, and young children. It hands programs fewer resources and fewer protections at the same time, and it removes many of the evidence-based standards that best serve children and families.
I see the difference those standards make across Massachusetts’s 28 Head Start agencies. Together, our programs serve more than 10,000 young children and families in ways that best meet the needs of their local communities, including full-day classrooms, home visiting models, and partnerships with early learning programs and public schools. Head Start programs enroll the most vulnerable children in their communities, who often need more than the basics that a licensed child care program provides. Head Start programs offer early education alongside health and dental care, developmental screenings, mental health support, nutrition, disability services, and family supports. Parents are partners and leaders in their children’s education and in the governance of their programs. And because the services are so customized to those who need them, the harms of the proposal will be felt most deeply by some of the most vulnerable families in our Commonwealth.
In Massachusetts, 16 percent of Head Start children experienced homelessness during the 2024–25 program year – an 82 percent increase from just two years earlier. Yet the proposed rule would make it harder for families experiencing homelessness to access Head Start by requiring families to provide documentation proving their homelessness status, documentation that many families cannot produce. For a family already living in crisis, it can mean losing access to the very program designed to help them stabilize.
