President Trump’s administration Thursday put forward new rules for Head Start that critics and advocates say could hobble the landmark early childhood education program serving 50,000 of New York’s most vulnerable low-income children.
An agency overseen by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. issued proposed relaxed guidelines for Head Start that would lower national standards and could reduce funding to community based groups and school districts that provide preschool programs as well as health and meals to poor kids.
RFK Jr. portrayed the changes as needed tweaks to cut costs and waste within the program that has enjoyed bipartisan support since its founding in the 1960s.
“It’s a program that works for the most vulnerable of the poorest kids in our society, and it’s really important we protect it,” Kennedy said on a conference call with reporters previewing the changes.
But critics slammed the proposed shifts, including eliminating rules mandating low student-teacher ratios, no longer requiring nutritional and health programs and cutting spending on administration for the program by two thirds.
They say the deregulation plan will end up dramatically weakening a $12 billion program that is often cited as the gold standard of holistic preschool social services.
“Trump is putting the program to the torch by rolling back federal standards that ensure Head Start be high quality,” Sen. Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor this week. “Trump’s changes will hurt America’s most vulnerable children and leave their families in the lurch.”
At an unrelated event, Gov. Hochul commented on the proposed changes: “While here in New York, we’re prioritizing our youngest, giving them a head start at a better life, we literally have the Trump administration talk about eviscerating the longstanding, wildly successful, nonpartisan Head Start program.”
The new proposed rules will be published this week and available for public comment from stakeholders for two months. They aren’t expected to go into effect for at least six months and could face legal challenges.
“Stripping away those rules would be really damaging to children,” said Nora Moran of United Neighborhood Houses, which operates 124 Head Start and Early Head Start sites in NYC. “It’s targeting the poorest children.”
The overhaul amounts to a step back from conservative Trump supporters’ original plan to kill Head Start altogether, a proposal that was put forward in the controversial Project 2025 policy blueprint.
Head Start is a $12 billion program that funds 1,200 centers nationwide. It serves around 700,000 of the nation’s poorest children, including those who are homeless, in foster care or disabled. The budget in New York State is about $800 million.
It has its own set of detailed rules mandating low student teacher ratios, health and safety screenings for kids, programs for children with special needs, and free meals.
“Head start isn’t just child care,” Moran said. “It thinks about the whole child and the whole family.”
The current regulations would be mostly scrapped, leaving providers to only abide by state rules that are often much less stringent or nonexistent.
The new rules would also cap Head Start programs’ federal grant money spending on administrative costs to 5%, a dramatic cut from the current 15%.
The Trump administration claims that would produce savings that would permit more children to enroll in the program for the same budget. But many advocates predict that could result in much lower quality services by rolling back oversight of programs and staff background checks.