Gutting Head Start would end services to thousands of San Diego families, cut hundreds of jobs

SAN DIEGO — President Donald Trump wants to cut all funding for Head Start, a move that would deprive thousands of San Diego County’s most vulnerable children and families of early education, child care and other wraparound services and could also eliminate hundreds of jobs in local Head Start programs.

If Congress decides to implement Trump’s plan, described in a draft budget document obtained by national news outlets last week, it would end the roughly 5,700 active Head Start slots in San Diego County.

“These opportunities open doors, not just for the children but for the entire family,” said Arnulfo Manriquez, CEO of Metropolitan Area Advisory Committee, or MAAC, a local provider of Head Start. “It will absolutely not improve the community by eliminating it like this.”

Head Start was launched six decades ago by President Lyndon B. Johnson as part of his War on Poverty. It is meant to be a comprehensive program that not only provides early education and child care for low-income children from infants to 5-year-olds but also wraparound services to help the children’s families out of poverty.

Local Head Start programs provide health screenings, meals, diapers and food distributions, mental health services and referrals to housing, job training, education and more. Families can qualify for Head Start if they are at or below the federal poverty line, currently $32,150 for a family of four.

“When you adjust for that cost of living, children in Head Start in California are facing the deepest poverty,” said Avo Madkessian, executive director of the children’s nonprofit First 5 California.

Last fiscal year, California received $1.7 billion in Head Start funding and served 84,200 children, according to Head Start’s website. That included 2,800 foster youths, more than 8,000 children experiencing homelessness and 53,000 English learners.

The preliminary budget document says the White House wants to eliminate Head Start to give control of education to states and to parents and believes the federal government “should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations, and performance standards for any form of education,” the Associated Press reported.

But children’s advocates say cutting Head Start will remove a lifeline for the health and developmental well-being of vulnerable children.

They also say the move will also exact an economic toll on the San Diego region: If they lose child care, Head Start parents may not be able to work.

Hundreds of local Head Start jobs would be eliminated.

Neighborhood House Association — San Diego County’s largest Head Start provider, serving 5,000 children — gets $97 million a year in Head Start funding and employs 1,200 people for Head Start programs, including teachers, mental health workers, nutritionists, social service workers, administrators and custodians, said Damon Carson, general education manager for the association.

MAAC, which receives $31 million in annual Head Start funding, employs 320 Head Start employees and also pays for another 180 employees who are subcontracted to provide Head Start services, Manriquez said. MAAC serves more than 1,100 children in Head Start.

If MAAC loses that funding, it would surely have to shut down its Head Start programs, Manriquez said. “We would not be able to go fundraise to continue this work — absolutely not,” he said.

California already faces a severe child care shortage, and Head Start already gets too little funding to provide slots for all eligible families. There are now 900 families on Neighborhood House Association’s waiting list, Carson said.

“Head Start funding was already not serving all children in poverty in California. And now the prospect of it being completely defunded would be catastrophic to our state,” Madkessian said.

Arisha Peabody, who moved to San Diego two years ago from Malaysia, said Head Start has allowed her time to earn her required equivalency certification and to apply to jobs — she has multiple degrees in health care administration.

The Head Start center in North Park has taken good care of her 2-year-old son, who was born premature and has additional health needs.

Peabody’s family would not be able to afford child care for him out-of-pocket. Her husband is in the Navy, but she was told the on-base child care has a yearslong waiting list.

“There’s no other place we can get such quality child care,” Peabody said.

The news about a potential end to Head Start is adding more stress for early education providers, who are already facing fear and anxiety stirred by Trump’s immigration crackdowns, officials said.

Compared to the K-12 teaching workforce, the early education workforce is powered by a much larger share of immigrants — anywhere from 10% to 19% of early education workers in California are immigrants, depending on the child care setting, according to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment.

And many families who rely on state-subsidized or federally funded child care like Head Start are themselves not U.S. citizens, or are part of mixed-status families.

“It has been a sense of fear, stress and anxiety across the board in all of our programs, both with staff and with participants,” Manriquez said. “It affects people wanting to go to work and wanting to even enroll in a program.”

Madkessian also noted there is a Head Start program specifically for the children of migrant workers. He said administrators of that program fear that if they operate this season, their sites may become targets for immigration enforcement.

Trump’s push to end Head Start is just one of several policies he is pursuing that advocates worry will hurt vulnerable young children.

That includes cuts to Medicaid, which provides free or low-cost health insurance and school-based health services for children; tariffs, which are expected to hurt the price and supply of baby products; and immigration crackdowns, which could impact vulnerable children, families and the early education workforce.

“What we’re seeing is just a comprehensive assault on the health and well-being of our nation’s most vulnerable babies,” Madkessian said. “It’s deeply, deeply concerning, because Head Start is not in isolation.”