JFC, now they're going after Head Start
That's child care and early education for 13,000 kids in Virginia. 1,200 in our district alone.
A few hours ago, the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration plans to cut about a third of the budget from Health and Human Services. That’s money for food and drug safety, medical research, and epidemic prevention.
It’s also money that specifically helps low-income young kids and moms: Head Start, which provides kids between ages 3 and 5 with health care, nutrition, and family support services, and Early Head Start, which does similar things for pregnant women, infants, and toddlers.
In the budget plan unearthed by the Post, Head Start and EHS don’t get merely get a haircut. They get axed completely.
Money for the Head Start program, which provides early child care and education for low-income families and is funded by HHS’s Administration for Children and Families, would be eliminated. “The federal government should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations and performance standards for any form of education,” the document says.
Together these two programs reach more than three quarters of a million kids every year. And they’re very effective, with benefits that reverberate as kids age. Kids who go through Head Start, for example, are almost 3 percent more likely to finish high school—and 39 percent more likely to finish college—than peers who don’t participate in the program.
What would that mean for Virginia and VA-5?
Throughout the commonwealth, more than 13,000 kids participate in one of the programs.
This interactive map from the Center for American Progress shows the number of Head Start slots by congressional district. As you can see, in the last school year, child care centers throughout VA-5 got more than $16 million to take care of 1,199 kids.
In Lynchburg, where John McGuire’s district HQ is located, there are 168 Head Start kids at three child care centers: two run by LynCAG and one run by Humankind Early Head Start.
Maybe the cuts won’t happen
The Post story offers some helpful to-be-sure context: “It is unclear which proposed cuts will stand in the budget proposal to Congress — and whether lawmakers will accept them. During the first Trump administration, Congress rejected some of the administration’s proposals, including a 20 percent cut to NIH.”
But if they do…
The Post goes on to note that “those who depend on this funding said the cuts would pose an existential threat to some programs”:
“It would be catastrophic,” said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association. “More than a million parents wouldn’t be able to go to work from all those children, or they would have to scramble to find some other type of option. In a lot of communities, Head Start is the only early childhood provider in the community — especially rural America.”
A Head Start teacher in Virginia, by the way, makes $46,971 a year.