Late this Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services — now run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — announced that five regional administrative offices for Head Start’s early education and day care programs in 22 states would be shut down immediately and without any advance warning.
One of those suddenly shuttered regional offices — Region IX — provides much-needed administrative support for Head Start operations in California, Arizona, Hawai’i, Nevada, and the Pacific Region. Nationally, Head Start — which was started in 1965 during former President Lyndon Johnson’s now famous War on Poverty — provides free day care, early childhood education, health-care services, and daily meals for the children of working poor families.
In Santa Barbara County, there are 20 Head Start campuses with roughly 200 employees now serving 600 families — many single-parent households led by a mother or father making no more than the federal poverty level. Although no cuts have yet been announced at the local campus level, Patricia Keelean, CEO of CommUnify/Head Start in Santa Barbara, expressed grave concern that it was only a matter of time before the budget ax fell.
Project 2025 — the basic blueprint crafted by key advisors to Donald Trump for what he could accomplish upon election — specifically called out the nearly sacrosanct childcare and early education program for total elimination. Although Trump himself has never spoken out against Head Start and has sought to maintain some rhetorical distance between himself and Project 2025, the document offers the most prescient and accurate game plan for his administration’s agenda to date.
Should Head Start be eliminated as Keelean fears, 600 low-income Santa Barbara County families would find themselves suddenly forced to secure childcare — notoriously expensive and almost impossible to find — on the open market or leave their kids with relatives, or simply not work. For employers who depend on this workforce, Keelean added, such cuts would prove disruptive in the extreme. She pointed out that 79 percent of Head Start’s Santa Barbara families have at least one working adult.
As Keelean and others brace for much deeper cuts, they are shuddering at the inexplicable suddenness of the cuts to the five regional offices. Combined, these serve Head Start campuses throughout no less than 22 states and the U.S. territories. Keelean said the regional office provides key fiscal management support to local operations, helping to ensure that individual campuses are in compliance with basic performance guidelines. The large and sprawling operation deals with the care, security, and education for more than 350,000 kids ranging in age from zero through 5 years old.
At the regional level, the offices help with teacher training, financial management, and all necessary and essential functions. They also teach teachers how to teach parents to be better advocates for the children as they go through the education system.
Head Start began, as the name suggests, in order to help the infants and toddlers of people living below the poverty line get a head start when they first engage with the education system. The program prepares kids from a very young age to become accustomed to educational routines by the time they hit school age. This includes not just daycare services from 7:30 in the morning to 6 in the evening, but pre-kindergarten early education, two meals a day, snacks, and medical services, including vision, hearing, and dental.
Project 2025 has charged that Head Start programs fail to provide adequate oversight over their young charges, but Head Start administrators cite statistics showing a rate of complaints — sustained and otherwise — of less than one percent.
Santa Barbara Congressmember Salud Carbajal — who himself worked several years at Goleta’s Head Start — and 33 other Congressmembers issued a letter on April 2 demanding that Kennedy explain what criteria his department used when deciding which regional offices to close, at what time regional staff were notified, and how Kennedy’s department planned to compensate for the loss of these critical support services. Their letter expressed “deep concern” that the “abrupt closures — without a clearly communicated transition plan — put the education “of our nation’s most vulnerable children and families at risk.”
Their letter went on to state that fiscal specialists working at the shutdown regional offices are critical in helping “local programs navigate complex federal regulations and provide early learning, health and family services to nearly 750,000 children across the country.” They noted that only one percent of Head Start’s $3.2 billion budget is spent on federal staff.