Just weeks ago, President Barack Obama and Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon called for better access to early childhood education — to the delight of advocates wanting broader access to preschool and quality child care.
But on Friday, $85 billion in automatic cuts to federal services promised to take a $406 million chunk out of the federal Head Start preschool program. Now, those same advocates are wondering how to deal with a cut that could put 205 St. Louis area children at risk of losing free services.
“It’s just going in the wrong direction,” said Anne Kessen Lowell, director of SouthSide Early Childhood Center. “We need to get our values and our math straight on this issue.”
The accredited child care center, which operates in one of the poorer areas of St. Louis, has 74 Head Start slots for children 6 months through preschool. Now some of those spots are at risk.
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Overall, Missouri is expected to lose 1,200 Head Start slots. The bulk of them are in poor urban and rural areas where quality, affordable child care is hard to come by.
On Friday, federal administrators said in a conference call with Head Start contractors that the cuts need to be made within the next seven months. The bulk of the cuts may not be felt immediately. While federal officials are still working through the details, they expect most of the cuts to slots and staff to be made during the summer.
The Head Start cut is in addition to a nearly 5 percent cut of $2.1 million to federal funding to support child care tuition subsidies for poor children across Missouri. It is estimated 700 children statewide will lose the subsidy, making it impossible for their parents to afford market rate child care.
The combined impact of all the cuts has the potential to send many borderline families into economic crisis, said Pat Holterman-Hommes, CEO of Youth in Need, one of the region’s three main contractors for Head Start.
“Not only are these children going to lose their high quality and safe child care and lose their chance to start kindergarten on par with their peers, parents are going to lose their jobs.”
About 4,100 Head Start slots are currently available in St. Louis and surrounding Missouri counties.
The cuts to Head Start and child care subsidies are part of dozens of automatic spending cuts to defense, human services and other federal programs under the federal sequester. The cuts took effect Friday after neither party in Congress could come up with a more palatable way to curb deficits by $1.2 trillion over the next decade.
For Missouri providers, it would be the second major hit to Head Start in less than a year.
Last spring hundreds of infant and toddler slots for poor children were lost in Missouri when lawmakers unexpectedly reduced state funding to the Early Head Start program, which serves infants and toddlers. Youth in Need lost funding for 25 of those slots. Republican legislative leaders said the cuts were needed to balance the state’s tight budget.
Nixon has proposed restoring Missouri funding this legislative session, but it is not a given.
Youth in Need of St. Charles currently oversees 1,200 Head Start slots in the region. It is now bracing for nearly $500,000 in federal cuts, 95 percent of it to Head Start. That could mean approximately 50 less slots for infants, toddlers and preschoolers and about 20 jobs lost, Holterman-Hommes said.
Head Start provides free home visits, child care, behavioral and health screenings and family support to children living in poverty.
It is credited with better preparing children for kindergarten. Proponents of quality early childhood argue such programs have long-term societal benefits, including evidence of increased high school graduation rates for participants, decreased rates of future incarceration and higher wages as an adult.
In his State of the Union address last month, Obama called for a massive expansion of preschool and early childhood education options for American children. Nixon made a similar pitch in his State of the State address.
Kids participating in Head Start through Youth in Need come from households with an average annual household income of about $15,000, but the majority earn only $3,000 a year. Instability is the norm in these families, said Keri Young, Head Start Director for Youth in Need.
“It’s hard for these children to feel safe and establish good healthy relationships,” Young said. “Head Start is a stable place where they know what to expect. They can build relationships with their teachers and they can learn the things to be ready to go to school.”
Roderick Jones, CEO of Grace Hill, another federal contractor of the program, said federal funding had already been stagnant and had not kept pace with rising expenses for rent and utilities at the child care centers they sponsor. Given those factors and the new cuts, he said the agency will likely petition to reduce the number of slots it supports in the city.
About 400 of those slots are part of St. Louis Public Schools’ rapidly expanding early childhood program, he said.
Cheryl Davenport, director of early childhood for the school district, said she is optimistic those slots will remain within the district’s preschool program.
“For us, we’ll just wait and see,” she said.
Nancy Cambria reports on child and family issues. Follow her on Twitter @nanecam.
