And at least one weekend per month, she provides all-day care to several children whose parents have to report for duty at the Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

Jackson is also licensed to provide overnight care, which she does occasionally as needed. 

Through these unconventional arrangements, Jackson provides “nontraditional hour care,” and as her schedule suggests, it can take a lot of different forms. Nontraditional hour care is a poorly understood yet widely sought form of early care and education, generally defined as any care being provided before 7 a.m. and after 6 p.m. on weekdays, and any hours on the weekends. 

It’s estimated that about 40% of children under age 6 with working parents spend at least part of their week in childcare during nontraditional hours, according to a from the Urban Institute, a social policy research nonprofit. The report, which analyzed household survey data from the National Survey of Early Care and Education, found this type of care to be more common among children from low-income families or in single-parent or non-parent households, as well as infants and toddlers. 

Families have a diverse range of circumstances and needs when it comes to care, especially working families with young kids. Sometimes, one parent can cover while the other works, or a relative such as a grandparent can step in to help. But in other cases, families must seek more formal arrangements. That’s where providers like Jackson and Desiree Reid come in.

Reid has been a licensed home-based childcare provider in the Bronx for about a decade. Before that, though, she had a long career as a financial manager — a role that required her to work late into the night and on weekends at times. In other words, Reid needed childcare during nontraditional hours before she became a childcare provider herself. Back then, when her son was still very young, she’d scrap together help from her mother and godmother during the week, and on the weekends, she’d take him to work with her and they’d hole up in her office. 

So when Reid opened her own childcare program and realized a lot of her families were doing shift work and needed flexible hours, she found herself adjusting her schedule. 

“At first it started with maybe one parent saying, ‘Oh, Ms. Desiree, I have to work till 8:30 tonight,’” Reid recalled. “What am I gonna do? Say, ‘leave your job, come get your kid and figure it out?’ No. So I extended my hours.”

The vast majority of nontraditional hour care is provided in homes, through a mix of licensed and unlicensed caregivers. Data varies, but across multiple sources, unlicensed care — and particularly unpaid unlicensed care — is the most used nontraditional hour childcare arrangement, followed by licensed home-based care, and then licensed center-based care. Erikson Institute, a graduate school in Chicago focused on early childhood education, cites data from the 2019 NSECE survey which that about 8% of centers and 34% of listed homes provide some form of nontraditional hour care, while the rest of the care supply is found in unlisted homes, often provided by relatives, but also some nannies, neighbors, friends and babysitters. 

For licensed providers, the shift into nontraditional hour care tends to come organically, as it did for Reid. Because home-based care is typically provided in a smaller and more intimate setting, providers often develop strong personal relationships with the families they serve. So when one family has a schedule change or needs extra help, providers may be inclined to accommodate them — sometimes without any additional pay, said Juliet Bromer, research professor at Erikson and University of Delaware. 

Different types of nontraditional hour care tend to get “lumped together,” Bromer said. But that can conflate the distinct experiences of providers caring for children during early mornings, late nights, overnight and on weekends.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about nontraditional hour care as this monolithic thing, because it isn’t,” said Bromer, who has studied this domain in Illinois. 

Each type of care comes with its own sets of challenges, routines and objectives. During weekend care — the most time for children to be in nontraditional hour care, according to the Urban Institute — many providers tend to offer children more downtime than they would during traditional weekday hours, said Diane Schilder, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who led the think tank’s research on nontraditional hour care in 2023. That reflects what parents have said they want during weekend care for their children: a greater focus on play and rest, much like they would have if their parents were able to be with them. 

That’s true for Jackson, the provider in Alabama, who said the biggest difference in how she runs her program on the weekends, compared to a weekday, is that she gives the children more time to relax. 

“The schedule has been so rigid during the week,” Jackson said. “I get it. They need the downtime. … They need that time to just rest.”

What that looks like in practice, she said, is extended time outdoors and more free time to do activities like puzzles and drawing. Just because their parents are at work, she said, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t get to unwind like other children do during their weekends.  

In New York, Reid’s weekend care is occasional, and a bit less predictable than Jackson’s. She cares for the children of immigration lawyers, taxi drivers and nurses. Often, one parent is available on the weekend to care for their kids when the other is not. But sometimes, their schedules will overlap and they’ll ask Reid to help. 

“As long as they can give me advanced notice and I’m available, sure,” Reid said. 

“I have staff, so if I need to step back, staff can step up,” she added, noting that she has one full-time and four part-time teachers to help with 14 children. “When I didn’t have staff, that was a different story. Oh, my gosh, that was exhausting.”

Reid and Jackson, like most providers who offer care during unconventional hours, also care for children during traditional hours. Cynthia Davis, a home-based provider in Washington, D.C. who operates 23 hours a day, distinguishes between the two by calling one her “traditional shift” and the other her “twilight shift.” 

When she shifted into childcare a couple of decades ago, she decided that she would serve children from low-income families, whatever it took. 

“If I was going to have a program, I wanted to be sure I could serve all parents, regardless of what their shift was,” she said. 

With her program located near a police station, a fire station and multiple hospitals, she has served children at all hours of the day — from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m., from 3 p.m. to midnight, from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. “That’s the hours some of the parents needed,” she explained. 

It’s a lifestyle that might wear on some people, but Davis enjoys it. “I’m a night owl,” she said. “That’s why I love overnight care. I love being up at night. Everybody is quiet. Nobody is disrupting you. It’s the daytime that wears me out.”

When she cares for children overnight, her adult daughter who works at the program handles morning care so Davis can get some sleep. “It’s why you need staff,” she said. “You have to balance it out. If you don’t have balance, you’ll drive yourself crazy.”

The most children Davis has cared for overnight, she said, is six. Eventually she learned that she couldn’t really care for infants overnight, since their sleep isn’t well established and they tend to wake the others. “Over time you learn how the children’s patterns are,” she said, noting that she’d strategically place an early riser farther from a child who sleeps in later. 

When children get dropped off for an overnight shift at Davis’ house, they must be bathed and ready for bed. She finds out from families what their bedtime routine looks like on a typical night — books, music, a bit of TV — “so we can mimic what you’re doing at home.” 

Most children sleep in twin-sized rollaway beds; she also has cribs, elevated cots, floor mats and air mattresses. She will put the beds out in the common area — spread throughout a spacious living room, dining room and back room — before the kids go to sleep. Then Davis posts up in her comfortable recliner chair. She has a refrigerator and table right next to the chair. She does not sleep when the babies sleep. 

In the morning, Davis helps the children brush their teeth, get dressed and eat breakfast. 

Soon, as she begins to think about winding down her working years, she plans to move away from traditional care and only offer the “twilight shift.” She’s a night owl, after all. 

Some center-based programs do offer care during nontraditional hours, but it’s uncommon and the programs that do so primarily serve a specific population, such as the children of shift workers near a large manufacturing plant or . 

“There are very, very few center-based programs that offer late night and overnight care,” said Bromer. “It’s unpredictable. No one needs overnight care every night.”

Many home-based providers will request a week’s notice or a few days’ notice for nontraditional hour care, but when families’ schedules are constantly changing, it’s not always possible. That is incompatible with the staffing setup in most centers, Bromer noted. 

Then there’s the practical reality, which is that — especially late at night, very early in the morning and overnight — want their children to be in a residential home, not a fluorescent-lit commercial building. 

Most centers don’t have space for beds, pointed out Natalie Renew, the executive director of Home Grown, a national collaborative of funders committed to improving the quality of and access to home-based childcare. What they have, instead, is thin cots. If given the option, many families would likely opt for rollaway beds like what Davis has in her home over “flimsy cots” in a center for their child’s overnight sleep. 

“In a home-based environment, children are an extension of the family, eating meals in the home, watching Jeopardy,” Renew said. “That’s a little more intuitive.”

For parents who work unconventional hours, it helps a great deal to know their child is sleeping in a bed inside someone’s home, even if it’s not their own, said Jackson. 

“It gives that parent more of a home feeling, versus in a commercial property, where it’s more of a business,” she said. “Families need us. They need the continuity of care. They need to know their babies are being treated with the utmost of respect.”

In many places, it can be hard to come by licensed providers offering care outside of standard business hours. Davis recalled a mom who would take the bus from southeast D.C. to her program in northwest D.C. to drop off her 6-month-old baby before going to her job as a security officer. She had to switch buses along the route, and when traffic was bad, it would take her two hours door to door. 

Access is one of the reasons that care from trusted family, friends and neighbors is by far the most popular option for parents who work nontraditional hours. (It is also the most care arrangement for families during traditional hours.) This could look like two neighbors who both work nonstandard hours taking turns watching each other’s kids in their homes. It could be a family friend helping out for a small fee. Often, though, it’s a grandparent or other family member.

These types of informal arrangements make up the “bulk” of nontraditional hour care, said Bromer of Erikson. Parent surveys have found that they prefer this care type for its flexibility, affordability and nurturing environment. 

“It’s not paid care,” in many cases, Bromer added, “but it is childcare.”

Tonia McMillan is an FFN provider in Southern California caring for her grandchildren during nontraditional hours. McMillan had a nearly 30-year career as a licensed home-based provider, during which time she did occasionally provide care outside of standard hours to families. She retired from that career in 2023, feeling ready to close that chapter. 

But then McMillan’s two adult sons — both single dads — had new babies on the way. At the time, she and her sons decided to “all get under the same roof” to help each other with expenses, and that included childcare. 

Today, McMillan lives in a five-bedroom house with her sons and two of her four grandchildren — now ages 9 and almost 2 — whom she regularly cares for in the evenings. During their dad’s late-night shifts with a trucking company, McMillan feeds them and puts them to bed. Some days, if he gets home especially late, she’ll also get the kids up in the morning, give them breakfast and get the older one to school. It works well, she said. 

“The only difficulty for me is my age,” said McMillan, who is 67. “Having to lift car seats in and out of cars … That’s part of the reason I retired. There’s such a physicality to doing childcare that people don’t realize. But here I am again.”

There are days when McMillan has to make sacrifices to be able to care for her grandchildren — she’s very social, she said — and that can be discouraging. But she loves that she is able to help and said she’ll keep doing it for as long as her son needs her. 

Still, she doesn’t view it as charity, and she doesn’t want others to see it that way either. McMillan gets about $1,200 per month in subsidy reimbursements from the state of California to take care of both children. 

“I don’t want to see this role being downplayed or portrayed as ‘you’re the grandmother, it’s your duty,’” she said. “That strips away the importance of this work — how it fills a void, how it takes care of a gap. But it also binds families and makes them stronger and able to do what needs to be done for their children, for their household. It is such an important role that serves such an important purpose.”

McMillan emphasized the importance of being able to provide childcare to her grandchildren in a space that is both theirs and hers. She can put the two children down in their own beds and then retire to her own room. 

“I can walk around in my moomoo,” she said. “I don’t have to worry about if my hair is combed.”

But the value runs deeper than that, too. 

“The comfort of being in a familiar surrounding with a familiar person who loves them unconditionally, it matters,” McMillan said. “My son doesn’t have to worry about calling or checking in, any of that. Just the trust factor alone carries so much weight. It carries so, so much weight.”

By mid-afternoon, Nabila Chehab has worked nearly a full day running one of Colorado’s universal preschool sites out of her home. She’s been awake since 5 a.m. and on her feet for hours. 

By 2 p.m., two 4-year-old girls from the preschool program remain in her care. They will be picked up in the next hour or so. Then the doorbell rings and two more girls — 5-year-old Amira and 2-year-old Nadine — burst through the front door and head straight to the back of the house, joining their peers in Chehab’s classroom. 

Chebab’s first shift of the day is almost over, but her second shift is just starting. 

Around 2:30, she prepares an afternoon snack of watermelon and Goldfish for the four girls. It is the first of several meals she will prepare for Amira and Nadine over the next seven hours while their mother works at a food and beverage stand during a concert at Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre, about 30 miles away. (�鶹��Ʒ is using the children’s first names only to protect their privacy as minors.)

As they munch on their snack, three more kids arrive. These are Chehab’s grandchildren — ages 6, 5 and 1 — and the older two sit around the table as she prepares fruit and crackers for them as well. 

The naturally lit, brightly colored back room is alive with the chatter and boundless energy of young children. If Chehab is losing steam, she doesn’t show it. The 61-year-old just smiles and serves. 

By day, Chehab is a licensed home-based childcare provider. Her program, which can accommodate up to six children at a time, has earned the from the state. These days, she is primarily focused on serving 4-year-olds in Colorado’s relatively new , although she enrolls younger children as well.  

Chehab is only a few years into this arrangement. Before opening her program, she cared for her grandchildren as an unlicensed . And prior to that, she worked as a teacher for 15 years and a director for five years at center-based programs, she said. 

Chehab is licensed with the state to provide care from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Mondays through Fridays, but she continues to help families outside of regular business hours. On Saturdays, she hosts a three-hour Arabic class for young children. (Chehab moved to Colorado from Lebanon in 2009.) On Sundays, she cares for three young children while their parents work. And then, about once a week as needed, Chehab cares for Amira and Nadine in the evenings while their mom works at the concert venue. 

The kind of childcare Chehab provides on weekends and some evenings, often referred to as nontraditional hour care, is used by about under age 6 with working parents. It is most often provided in people’s homes through a mix of licensed and unlicensed care. This type of care can take place in the early mornings, late in the evenings, overnight and on weekends, based on the diverse needs of families. Often, providers like Chehab make themselves available during nonstandard hours only after a family that is already in their care has a change in plans or needs more help. 

That’s what happened with Amira and Nadine. 

Last school year, Amira was enrolled in Chehab’s universal preschool program. Nadine would occasionally join her older sister at Chehab’s house, so both girls became familiar with the provider. 

The girls’ mother, Marissa Kishell, has been working at Red Rocks since 2022, she said, taking shifts about three nights a week during peak season, which spans from spring to fall. Kishell’s mom — Amira and Nadine’s grandmother — would watch the girls at night while Kishell went to work, but when the girls’ grandmother got in a serious car accident in fall of 2025, she was unable to care for them for several months. 

Kishell enlisted Chehab’s help in the evening for the first time back in January, when she had a one-off work event, she recalled. When the Red Rocks concert season kicked off this spring, she began to turn to Chehab more often. 

“No one had ever watched them, especially at night, except for me and my mom,” Kishell said. “With everything that goes on these days, it’s hard to trust your kids with people.”

She worried, initially, about how it would go — but more so about how she would do leaving the girls than how they would do with Chehab. 

“She’s always so welcoming. Her house is cozy and clean,” Kishell said of Chehab. “I was never worried about if they would be OK.”

Now, Kishell will typically get her work schedule about a week in advance, she said. Then she’ll ask her 73-year-old mom — who watches the girls for free — which nights she can take them. Often, Kishell said, her mom will commit to all three nights but then, as the week goes on and she becomes more tired, she might ask to offload a night or two. (Her mom recovered from the car accident, Kishell said, but her energy level is not the same.) That’s when Kishell will ask Chehab, who lives about a 5-minute drive away, to take the girls for a night.

After hours of playing, the girls tell Chehab that they’re hungry. With Amira and Nadine in the kitchen alongside her, helping as much as they can, Chehab prepares a meal of lamb ribs, brown rice, Lebanese yogurt, salad, hummus and bread. The girls sit down to eat around 5:30 p.m. with Chehab, her husband Yassine Ahmed and a family friend. 

This is one of the elements of Chehab’s care that Kishell deeply appreciates. Both of her girls are “very comfortable” at Chehab’s house and “have a lot of fun there,” Kishell said, but it’s more than that.

“It’s nice for me that they get more of a home environment, and they’re having a home-cooked meal, and it’s more of a structure,” she said, “than going to a random babysitter’s house.”

That’s important to Chehab too. It’s central to her philosophy as a provider. 

“I don’t treat my families like clients,” Chehab said. “I treat them like family.”

Kishell pays about $30 per hour for Chehab to watch the girls in the evenings — $15 per hour per child — which she figures is about what she’d have to pay for the average babysitter. With Chehab’s experience and classroom materials and quality rating from the state, she feels it’s a great outcome for her and the girls. 

After dinner, Chehab helps the girls wash their hands then takes them on a walk around the neighborhood, during which they spot airplanes flying overhead. 

Back at Chehab’s house, she takes the girls into the greenhouse in her backyard, where they look for ripe vegetables to pluck and place in nets. Chehab’s garden is varied and sprawling. Inside the greenhouse, she has tomatoes and cucumbers, along with herbs such as parsley, cilantro and mint. Elsewhere in the backyard, she grows green grapes, sumac, apples, pears and peaches, although she said the fruit trees have not borne fruit during this especially hot summer. 

Both Amira and Nadine come out of the greenhouse with a few cherry tomatoes and finger-length cucumbers. 

“This one is so big!” Amira says, admiring her cucumber. “I want to take mine home.”

Chehab helps the girls wash and pack their vegetables to take home later. 

Kishell saw the vegetables from the garden when she got home that night. The girls also brought home a flower craft they’d made. These kinds of keepsakes make Kishell especially grateful. 

“I don’t think they would get quite the same experience with anybody else,” she said. 

Kishell’s appreciation is not lost on Chehab. 

“She values my work with her kids,” Chehab said of Kishell. “She sees how they improve.” 

At about 6:45 p.m., Nadine begins to rub her eyes and show signs of sleepiness — she skipped her nap today, Chehab said. “She’s ready for bed.” Instead, Chehab will try to keep them occupied until pickup, which Kishell prefers.  

Kishell’s husband, Mo Shesao, will pick up the girls at 9 p.m. Shesao has his own car shop, where he works as a mechanic. He usually stays until the work is done, Kishell said, so if someone brings their car in midday and needs it back by the next day, he’ll keep at it until he’s finished. 

Some nights, the girls stay at Chehab’s later — until 10 or 11 p.m. On those nights, Kishell will pack them a bag with toothbrushes, hairbrushes and pajamas so they can get ready for bed before they are picked up. Occasionally, Chehab said, Nadine will fall asleep at her house. Usually, though, they’ll wait until they are in the car or at home. Both children are accustomed to a 10 p.m. bedtime at home anyway, Kishell said. Since she stays home with them during the day, they have nowhere to be in the mornings and will often sleep in.

Chehab reads stories with the girls until about 7 p.m. Nadine picks out, “Big Gorilla: A Book of Opposites,” and Chehab quizzes the girls on opposites. 

“What’s the opposite of short? What’s the opposite of night? What’s the opposite of heavy?”

Next, Chehab sets up a paint station for the sisters. They don aprons and each pick out three colors and a paintbrush. As the girls get going, Chehab says to Amira, “Tell me about your picture.”

Amira has combined her three paints to create a dark blueish-brown hue, which she is trying to use to cover the entirety of her paper. 

“It’s going to be different,” Amira says, answering Chehab. She thinks about it more, then adds: “Spooky.”

As they finish up, Amira tells Chehab and her sister, “Next time, I’m going to take this to the museum … so they can hang it up.”

It’s August, so at 7:30 p.m., it’s still light outside. The trio heads outside to sing and dance with scarves. Chehab gives no indication that her stamina is flagging. She continues to play with and engage the girls as if the day is new. 

Around 8 p.m., the sky darkens and the girls go inside to have one final snack. They eat pretzel sticks and drinkable yogurt with straws in the basement while Chehab finds them an age-appropriate show to play on the television for 15 minutes. (She watches the clock closely to make sure they don’t get more screen time than that.) 

Once the girls are settled with their snacks and show, Chehab and her husband roll out their prayer mats and kneel to pray a few feet away. Amira can be heard slurping the last few sips of her yogurt while her caregiver quietly recites her prayers.

Around 8:30, after night has fallen and with only a half-hour left at Chehab’s, both girls become more subdued. They lay together on Chehab’s couch, still giggling and muttering, but more softly now. 

At 8:55 p.m., a car horn can be heard from the driveway. Moments later, the girls race to the front door to greet their dad. Then they give hugs and kisses to Chehab and tell her goodnight. As quickly as they’d entered the house earlier that afternoon, they now exit it, leaving a strange stillness in their wake.  

Chehab’s night is nearly over too. She will prepare her Turkish coffee for the next morning, take a shower, pray once more and then go to bed. She’ll wake up tomorrow, without an alarm, at 4:30 or 5 a.m., she said. Then she’ll head to the gym, where she swims every day, and return home, ready to greet another group of young children. 

This story was supported by New America’s Better Life Lab Childcare Reporting Grant.

At 10:30 p.m. on a Monday in the Bronx, it’s bedtime for many children. But at Juana Grisel Peña’s apartment, 2-year-old Brandon is just arriving. Peña, who goes by Grisel, greets him with a hug as he joins three other children — 7-year-old Sage and brothers Legend, 2, and Legacy, 1 — who are playing with toys in another room as they wind down for the evening. (�鶹��Ʒ is using the children’s first names only to protect their privacy as minors.)

The four children are spending the evening at Al Despertar, a licensed, home-based childcare program Peña runs out of her apartment, which sits three blocks from Yankee stadium. Their parents are working late-night or overnight shifts: one at the MTA, another at a local grocery store, and a third at Amazon. Some of the children will stay at Al Despertar late into the night, while others will sleep over and get picked up in the morning. 

From Monday through Friday, Peña cares for up to six children in her overnight program, which runs from around 6 p.m. to 9 a.m. They arrive and leave at different times, depending on their parents’ work schedules. She has a staff of five childcare providers, three who typically work at the daytime program and two who assist her with night shifts. 

When Peña started her program about 10 years ago, it was initially only open during the day, but she quickly noticed demand among working families with jobs that stretch beyond traditional business hours so she adjusted course to meet their needs. Over the years, she has transformed nearly every corner of her home around the children she cares for. Her living room is filled with learning activities and brimming with toys; bilingual signs about handwashing and nutrition standards hang in the bathroom and kitchen; and a pile of sleeping mats are neatly stacked in a closet of the second bedroom in her apartment, ready to be set up each day for the children.

“I want the parents to go to work and be in peace,” Peña said. “I remember when I had my kids I didn’t feel that peace when they were in someone else’s care and I don’t want anyone to feel that way. I understand it’s not easy.”

Peña’s program meets a significant need for parents. Research by the estimates that 40% of young children under age 6 with working parents spend at least part of their week in childcare during nonstandard hours like early mornings, evenings or weekends. The care can be tough to find though since not all licensed childcare providers operate during those hours. “I went through a lot of trouble trying to find this place,” Sage’s dad said. “There’s not a lot of overnight daycares.”

There are countless small, yet meaningful moments that define the kind of care Peña offers — whispered bedtime stories, shared mealtimes and comforting nighttime and morning routines that help children navigate transitions.

The photographs below, taken at Peña’s apartment during one of her overnight shifts in August, offer a glimpse inside one provider’s experience operating around-the-clock care, revealing a side of childcare that’s rarely seen.

8-11 p.m.

11 p.m.- midnight

5:30-8:30 a.m.

This story was supported by New America’s Better Life Lab Childcare Reporting Grant.

The program has served in every state in the nation, ensuring kids not only receive access to early learning opportunities, but have what they need to learn — nutritious food, health supports, developmental screenings, and the like. It also supports their families to become healthy, well, socioeconomically stable, and skilled advocates for their children’s education. 

The impacts have been short-term, long-term, and even intergenerational, reaching the children of Head Start graduates, improving their  , employment, , and . Meanwhile, research indicates that linguistically diverse kids — Head Start calls them dual language learners — have been . 

That’s why the Trump administration’s recent proposal to enact a national English-only mandate in Head Start classrooms is so mistaken. This idea undermines the administration’s own objectives by for parents and giving local Head Start providers less regulatory flexibility while imposing a greater compliance burden. 

Today, about a third of Head Start’s enrollees are dual language learners. These children have long been a focus for the program. In 1975, President Gerald Ford’s administration launched regulations that . For decades since, Republican and Democratic administrations (including the first Trump administration) have sustained that requirement. 

Fifty-one years later, it’s clear that Head Start’s architects were ahead of their time. Bilingual early learning centers and schools are — with both English-dominant families and with families speaking other languages at home. that these programs are highly effective for English learners and English-dominant students alike. 

The Trump administration’s English-only proposal is not only misaligned with science, law, and the administration’s own stated goals, it will also cost taxpayers. Given that roughly speak a non-English language proficiently, implementing English-only instruction would force providers to spend considerably on restaffing and purchasing new learning materials. Specifically, implementation costs would be between $73 million and $124 million. 

That’s a lot to pay, particularly to abandon a half-century of bipartisan consensus that Head Start works best when it’s responsive to the needs of the particular communities it serves. Indeed, this when it exempted tribal communities from the proposal’s English-only mandate so that tribes could build stronger connections between children and their heritage. Why would this be any different for children who speak other, non-tribal languages at home and in their neighborhoods? 

The proposed English-only mandate is also a resoundingly bad idea on the merits. : for the nearly one-third of Head Start attendees that speak a non-English language at home, bilingual learning is the educational gold standard. When these children have opportunities to strengthen their abilities in their first languages — while also being exposed to English — they are more likely to become fully proficient in English and succeed academically. 

Maybe this seems . Why wouldn’t English-only instruction help linguistically diverse kids learn more English? It appears that bilingual early care and education programs help these children become stronger language learners in general. That is, by developing their first languages more deeply, they become more confident language users, more able to understand complex elements of grammar, syntax, and the like. Over time, these stronger language competencies help them to more thoroughly and rapidly acquire English. What’s more, bilingual programs absolutely still provide young, linguistically diverse kids with English-language instruction. 

Bilingual learning models work for early education and K–12 programs alike. Over half a century ago, Texas launched one of the country’s most ambitious commitments to bilingual education. Since that time, the state has grown its investments in these programs to a point where it is now, perhaps, the country’s best school system for English-learning students. On the Nation’s Report Card, better in math and English language arts than their peers in almost every other state. 

Finally, in a more general — and a more urgent — sense, anyone who cares about kids’ well-being should also be concerned whether it’s a good idea to trade in safety and quality for more seats. Even if — after spending around $100 million on a national English-only mandate for local Head Start providers — the administration’s proposal lowered costs enough to expand the number of available seats, those seats wouldn’t be of high enough quality to keep kids healthy, safe, and learning, let alone deliver the results that have made Head Start so effective for so many decades. 

And at some point, once safety, quality, and the high standard of care that has made Head Start the national guidepost are dissolved — we need to ask ourselves what exactly are we expanding access to? 

Now, Illinois providers aren’t getting written up by the state for failing to carry quarters, but the fact that they could be because this outdated regulation has remained in the state’s licensing manual is problematic.

Childcare regulation is an active topic across many state legislatures and now, with the newly proposed Head Start rule, at the federal level as well. Every state has its , and stakeholders increasingly see streamlining regulations — while preserving health and safety standards — as one key to a healthier childcare system. As policymakers take steps to reform childcare regulation, they need to not only get rid of outdated rules, but also consider that interpretation and implementation drive how a regulation plays out in practice. 

Take fire code regulations, for example, which are set at the state and local level, and are core to child safety. To become licensed in any state, a childcare program must be compliant with these regulations, but that can be a complicated process, or even a barrier to entry. A 2025 about California’s childcare sector published by the Goldman School of Public Policy at University of California, Berkeley found that inconsistency in messaging and interpretation were widespread. 

Madeline Bradshaw, the report’s author, noted that “Providers participating in this research consistently reported receiving conflicting information from fire officials and licensing agencies about what fire safety requirements apply to their specific childcare settings” and that many “referenced receiving inconsistent messaging or inconsistent information, whether between fire officials at the state and local levels or even among fire officials within the same department.” California also ran into issues in 2023, when a lack of communication about a statewide building code update created confusion between what fire marshals and state licensors required. That and left some on the hook for costly renovations in order to become compliant.

This is not a problem endemic to one specific state, though. This year, Colorado childcare owner RB Fast her Kafka-esque experience trying to expand her program by opening a new center. Confusion and conflicting directions from the city’s planning, zoning and fire departments have led to significant delays, financial hardship for her and her staff, and has prevented her from serving more families, she shared. 

In April, a report published by Opportunities Exchange, a nonprofit consulting group focused on early care and education, of a Massachusetts provider who “identified a classroom space that met the 35 square foot of usable space per child required by their childcare licensing authority.” The report went on to explain that the provider “ later learned that the local building occupancy code required 35 square feet per person, including adults. The discrepancy was not identified until renovations were well underway, ultimately forcing the provider to reduce enrollment capacity and absorb lost time and income.” 

Beyond fire and building codes, which apply to many industries, there are unique regulatory interpretations that come into play specifically for childcare programs — and perhaps none have been in the news this year more than one about bananas. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat from Washington state, raised the issue when she introduced the Cutting Red Tape on Child Care Providers Act. Colloquially known as the “banana bill,” the measure would prohibit states from creating barriers to preparing fresh fruit and vegetables, including washing, peeling and cutting produce. On April 30, the U.S. House passed a large agricultural “” that incorporated provisions of the banana bill.

The banana kerfuffle stemmed from a Washington state requiring childcare programs to have multiple sinks if providers prepare and serve food and to have at least eight feet between that food preparation area and the sink used for handwashing after diaper changes. The rule was intended to avoid cross-contamination, but it’s been for being interpreted by certain state inspectors as requiring the equivalent of a commercial kitchen in order to peel and slice bananas. Even though a spokesperson from the state’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families the Department “has never penalized a childcare provider for incorrectly serving fruit,” the example has become an avatar .

Even when the scope of a regulation is clear, the capacity of a given governing agency to play their part can create bottlenecks. Consider the fingerprint background check requirement for new childcare employees, a step that is not particularly open to interpretation. A that requires background checks be processed through two state agencies — Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation — is in some cases causing weeks-long delays in getting new hires through the process. One provider having four new hires stuck waiting for their background check forms to be processed. 

However, this kind of regulation isn’t always harmful to providers: of new background check requirements in Minnesota that went into effect in 2017 found that those requirements were not associated with increased closures among licensed family childcare providers and in fact appear correlated with fewer closures, suggesting that the implementation of those regulations has gone far smoother.

The disparate experiences of providers — often shaped by their geographic location or which inspector shows up — points to the need for local, state, and federal leaders to focus not only on the content of the regulation book, but how regulations are playing out in practice. If the goal of childcare regulation is to shape a system that promotes health, safety and quality with abundant supply, then policymakers must think beyond the words on the page and consider how rules and regulations are being implemented in everyday programs. 

Ensuring that relevant departments have consistent guidance, are adequately staffed, , and have updated technology in order to process forms in a timely manner is core to effective rollout. State policies should also be reviewed regularly, with an eye toward outdated or out-of-touch requirements that may hinder providers’ ability to best serve children and families. And when a new regulation is put into play, clarity and coordination should be the watchwords. 

Nationwide, nearly 40,000 Head Start jobs could be cut, affecting the program’s teachers, home visitors, child development specialists, family service workers and many other positions, according to an from Together for Head Start, a coalition of national, state and local organizations that formed in 2025 to protect and strengthen Head Start amid growing threats from the Trump administration. 

The analysis draws from projections made by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in its proposed rule, “,” which was published on Aug. 7 and is now in a 60-day public comment period, set to end on Oct. 6.

Other impacts, the analysis found, include a 6% to 9% pay cut among some staff, including directors, fiscal officers and staff who oversee health services, as well as stagnant wages for teachers, even as they are expected to care for up to 32% more children. 

The proposed rule would also reduce healthcare services for children and families by up to , which could result in many families seeking out medical, dental and mental healthcare elsewhere, with some having to travel to access that care or, in some cases, going without it altogether.

To come up with these numbers, Together for Head Start analyzed projections detailed in the proposed rule change, which included a evaluating the potential costs, benefits and outcomes of the regulation if it were to be implemented. 

The proposed rule would give individual programs more discretion, but it’s hard to predict the precise impact, since some programs may make more changes to their operations than others. For that reason, HHS offers three scenario-based models for each regulation change over a five-year horizon: a low, primary and high estimate based on how many programs take advantage of the change. Together for Head Start used the high estimate scenario throughout its analysis. The group also used from Child Care Aware of America about the price and affordability of childcare to draw some conclusions. 

The administration mentions the word “flexibility” 160 times in its proposed rule, suggesting that fewer regulations and performance standards will give Head Start operators greater freedom in how they run their programs. Leaders at HHS are also quick to tout the they estimate would follow these changes by 2031. (The Head Start program is currently at about $12.4 billion annually.)

Staff involved in the leadership and operations of Head Start programs, however, have a much more bleak interpretation of the proposed overhaul. 

“It’s not a $2.2 billion savings. It’s a $2.2 billion cut in workforce and services,” said Rhett Cecil, executive director of the Indiana Head Start Association, which is part of the Together for Head Start coalition.

In the analysis from Together for Head Start, which includes state-by-state impacts, Indiana is projected to lose nearly 600 jobs. That amounts to about 15% of the state’s Head Start workforce, Cecil said. The analysis also estimates that Indiana would face a $2.6 million decline in funding for healthcare services under the rule, and that each family accessing Head Start services could face an average annual increase of $622 in childcare costs per child. 

These changes, Cecil said, would “handcuff” families, particularly in rural areas. Half of Indiana’s Head Start programs operate in rural areas, he said, where Head Start is often the only provider of health screenings, disability screenings and mental health services for young children. 

“If we take that away,” he asked, “what does that do to half our state?”

Cecil is in favor of a comprehensive review of the , he said. He believes there is room for improvement. 

“But you can’t do that without looking at the six decades of research and data that have been built around Head Start, then going out into the field and talking to seasoned leaders and practitioners in classrooms,” he said. “They’ll really tell us where changes could get made.”

The changes being proposed now, he said, seem to have come from people sitting in an “ivory tower somewhere in Washington, D.C.,” without the involvement or consultation of people on the ground. 

Kara McFalls, executive director of the Pennsylvania Head Start Association, doesn’t buy the narrative the administration has put forward either. 

“It’s false flexibility,” she said. “It will only increase stress and burden dramatically.”

Together for Head Start estimated that Pennsylvania would lose more than 1,300 jobs and almost $6 million in funding for health services, and that each family would face an average annual increase of $635 in childcare costs per child. The latter estimate comes from in which children receive 99 fewer hours of Head Start annually — a cost-saving mechanism for the government, but one that would place the burden on families to find alternative care arrangements for their children while they work.

That additional financial strain on families with children in Head Start — who are, by definition, living in poverty — would be enormous, McFalls said. To be for Head Start, a family of four must earn less than $33,000 per year, which equals 100% of the federal poverty level. For a family of two, such as a single parent and a child, it’s around $22,000. 

“It would be devastating for them,” McFalls said of the projected $635 increase in annual childcare costs. “That could be their ability to stay in their housing. … That could be the difference of food on their table, food for all the people in their family for months. That could be the difference in their ability to fix their car to be able to go to work.”

That’s to say nothing of the nearly 8% of children currently enrolled in Head Start who could lose access to the program altogether because their eligibility is based on family self-attestation. (The HHS proposal would as a way to satisfy eligibility requirements.) Many of these families are experiencing housing instability or homelessness and cannot provide the documentation needed to prove eligibility, said Yvette Sanchez Fuentes, senior vice president of government relations and federal policy at Start Early, a nonprofit advocacy organization that launched Together for Head Start and provided support for the recent analysis. 

“This whole [proposed rule],” she said, “is reducing access — and reducing equitable access — to families we know could use Head Start, deserve Head Start and for whom Head Start could actually make a huge difference in their lives.” 

Sanchez Fuentes is not alone in worrying about what will happen to the Head Start workforce once teachers are asked to care for increasing numbers of children. The proposed rule change would remove Head Start’s notably low adult-to-child ratio requirements and ask that programs defer to state licensing guidelines. 

Currently, only two states align with Head Start ratio standards for 2-year-olds, and five states align with ratios for 3-year-olds, according to from the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University. That means a Head Start teacher working with 3-year-olds in the 45 other states could see their classroom size balloon. Rather than two teachers caring for 16 children, as is currently required in Head Start classrooms, that same pair of educators could end up serving up to 30 children in some states, including Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas.

“That is not education,” said Cecil. “That is simply crowd control.”

Increased class sizes, on top of reductions in support staff and essential services, could eventually lead qualified staff to leave Head Start, said Sanchez Fuentes.

“It’s only going to compound the pressure on people who are there every day,” she said. 

When Sanchez Fuentes thinks about the legacy of Head Start over its past 60 years as a federal antipoverty program, she sees it as a leader in the field of early care and education, “at the forefront of innovation,” using science and data to inform its programming. Head Start expanded to serve infants and toddlers under Early Head Start in the 1990s, when “nobody was paying attention to babies,” she said, offering an example. 

“To suddenly be at this point where 90% of those things are going to go away? It’s heartbreaking,” Sanchez Fuentes said, referring to the fact that the administration is proposing Head Start standards be reduced from 133 pages to about a dozen. 

“We will no longer have this foundational piece of quality that’s good for kids,” she added. “What does that say about how we care about our kids?”

Wearing her school’s optional uniform and “ABC” bows in her hair, Mia excitedly entered the building, greeted multiple adults with “Good morning!” and hugs, and ran to the school bus balloon display for a photo opp. 

“Can I see Mia?” the precocious toddler asked, wanting to approve the picture. 

Her aunt, who dropped Mia off Thursday morning, said that when the family found out she had gotten one of the coveted 2-K slots — some 5,700 families applied — they were “so excited.” She said the rollout of the free early care and education program was a boon for the city at large — especially its toddlers.

“Sometimes at 2, if they’re not in daycare, they’re just sitting at home,” she said. “So this means a lot. It’s a wonderful opportunity.”

Mia’s new school, Innovators Prep, sits in a commercial building nestled between a hardware store and an urgent care on Church Street, in a part of East Flatbush, Brooklyn also known as Little Caribbean. It’s one of neighborhoods across four boroughs selected by the mayor’s office to participate in the initial 2-K rollout, based on economic need and high childcare demand.

Innovators Prep houses 24 of the , which kicked off Thursday as part of Mamdani’s signature early learning expansion plan. The weeks leading up to the launch were marked by an ongoing , which left a number of providers without months worth of city funding and scrambling to open.

Innovators Prep is still awaiting their contract registration but just received a bridge loan from the city on Monday, Polina Ioureva, the center’s founder and CEO, told �鶹��Ʒ. The center’s 2-K program opened two days early, on Tuesday, to align with opening day for its other early education programs, Ioureva said, and because it worked better for many of their families. 

Once inside, the school is all welcoming balloons, posters, toys and music, drowning out the sounds of the city’s bustling streets.

Mia’s aunt, who brings her niece to school because Mia’s mom is a teacher and has to be at work before the program’s 8 a.m. start, said the family fell in love with Innovators Prep on their initial tour. She described the first day drop-off as “smooth,” saying her niece is “so excited so far, and she just went right on in.” 

Already school has become one of Mia’s favorite things — along with Bluey and going to the park.

Not all new learners had as easy a time separating from their grown-ups. Two-year-old Giovanni, wearing a Scooby-Doo T-shirt and construction-themed backpack, initially bounded into the building and began posing for photos and squeezing the oversized, blow-up crayon balloons in the lobby. But as soon as his mom and siblings tried to leave, he began to cry. Wiping tears from his face, he was ultimately distracted with breakfast, a toy truck and his new teacher, who came out to greet him.

“We got one in!” exclaimed one of the center’s leaders, as Giovanni headed to his new classroom, green car in hand.

Throughout the morning, the lobby of Innovators Prep buzzed with the excitement, giggles, tears, shrieks and the general organized chaos familiar to any early learning environment.

Ioureva first opened the school in 2023, following a career as a preschool teacher, director and eventually instructional coordinator with the NYC Department of Education. In that role, she supported teachers in the same Brooklyn district she was a student in years ago and assisted with the rollout of 3-K under former Mayor Bill De Blasio. 

“Now I’m able to take everything I’ve learned and bring it into the classrooms,” she said, describing her career’s many “full circle” moments. It’s been particularly exciting to see the 2-K launch from the other side, she said, and to be able to support a whole new group of families.

Emmy Liss, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Child Care and Early Childhood Education, referred to this week’s launch as “our Super Bowl.” She said she’s already heard from many families who are “excited for what this is going to mean for their kids,” while also “allow(ing) them to save a tremendous amount of money this year.”

As of 2024, the annual cost of private childcare ranged between $16,900 to $26,000 annually, according to the A family would need to make over a year — the equivalent of 10 minimum-wage jobs — to afford the average cost of childcare for a single 2-year-old, according to the New York City’s comptroller’s office.

In response to questions around the delayed funding, Liss on Wednesday echoed Mamdani’s earlier comments, saying that this year’s delays “were unacceptable,” and noting that “our teams have been working around the clock over the last couple of weeks to expedite the contract registration process, get loans to childcare providers who said that they need them and just generally make sure that all providers have what they need to have a smooth opening day tomorrow.”

At the end of August, Mamdani pledged to ensure all classrooms would be operational by opening day; he also said he’d triple the number of staff working to approve contracts. The city, he said, has issued more than 300 loans and 500 contracts and was approving loans within

When asked if any centers would delay opening because of funding shortfalls, Liss replied, “At this time, we’ve been able to support all the centers who’ve reached out to us with any sort of concern.”

Still, some providers said they hadn’t received the promised bridge loans as of Wednesday and at least one Brooklyn 3-K and pre-K site sent a letter to parents saying they would be opening a week late because of funding delays, according to reporting from Others have taken out lines of credit in order to open their doors. 

Ioureva told �鶹��Ʒ her center was never at risk of a delayed opening, partially due to other sources of funding she has since the site is also a 3-K and preschool. Still, she and the other leaders at her school expressed worry for providers running smaller, home-based programs, who they feared have been hit harder.

Funding and contract delays have long plagued the city’s early childhood system; they appear to be particularly brutal this year thanks to a confluence of factors, including a of the department under former Mayor Eric Adams.

Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer at the early childhood advocacy organization , said system problems like the ones facing the Mamdani administration are to be expected because for years “we’ve disinvested in (early education) and made it everybody’s private responsibility instead of the public good it should be” so “we haven’t really put the money into building the infrastructure.”

“But (the 2-K program is) showing that we can build big things at scale … and that’s an important reminder for people that government can do … big things that are going to meaningfully help lower costs for families and make their lives easier,” she said.

The Mamdani administration has pledged that 2-K will grow six-fold next year, to serve 12,000 2-year-olds, and continue expansion until it is fully scaled, reaching all interested families, by the end of his first term. The first two years will be backed through a investment from the state, with funding beyond that still uncertain.

In the school year, almost 44,000 students were enrolled in NYC 3-K and just under 60,000 in pre-K. 

Pancakes and ‘Baby Shark’

In Mia’s classroom later that morning, she sat among friends at a small, wooden table for breakfast. “I like to eat pancakes!” she announced. After finishing her own, she turned to another 2-year-old to her left asking, “Can I eat your pancakes?”

Her teacher, Anasia Allard, greeted other students and moved around the woodland adventure-themed classroom. Beneath intricate vines made of construction paper that hung from the ceiling, Allard, an early educator for seven years, sang to her students and soothed some as they cried, reminding them of their breathing techniques.

Following their meal, a few students danced along to the viral hit song “Baby Shark,” before the entire class transitioned to circle time on the rug. There, Allard had all of the wiggly 2-year-olds take a seat and “catch a bubble,” a common phrase early educators use to ask students to turn off their voices and re-focus. She then sang good morning to each one, and went over the weather, date and days of the week. 

Students in the 2-K program at Innovators Prep have access to just over six hours of care each weekday, from 8 a.m. to 2:20 p.m. All families have to do is show up, and the center provides the rest, including diapers and other essential supplies. While at school, toddlers receive two meals and a snack; use of a rooftop playground; extensive programming and plenty of time for play. Students are also eligible to receive early intervention services and developmental screenings. 

In all, the center serves just over 100 kids, across 10 classrooms, two of which are 2-K. They currently have a 2-K waitlist of at least 200 families that at one point reached nearly 400, according to 2-K educational director Christine Wooding.

Mamdani’s expansion has also meant more 3-K and preschool kids can access programming at Innovators Prep for free, without having to navigate the city’s complicated voucher system. 

Wooding said the center’s working families have already expressed how thankful they are and a number are interested in extended hours.

“They are very happy,” she said. “They have a comfortable place (where) they know their child is happy and getting the support that they need.”

Nearly 86,000 of California’s children ages 0 to 3 — more than 5% of the state’s infants and toddlers — are estimated to have experienced homelessness in 2023-24, according to new data analysis by SchoolHouse Connection and Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan.

This is a 15% jump from about 74,000 young children in the year prior.

Only about 12,000 of those children in 2023-24 were enrolled in early learning programs. It is often in early learning programs where staff members are able to identify children experiencing homelessness and provide critical services for their development.

That just 14% of the youngest children experiencing homelessness are in these programs is potentially a troubling sign, experts say. It may indicate the state is not set up to accurately identify and reach most of these children.

“We just don’t have the full picture,” said Erin Patterson, a senior director at SchoolHouse Connection. “Data reporting infrastructure everywhere is lacking when it comes to infants and toddlers experiencing homelessness. There is no singular federal agency or program that captures everything.”

This is after years of sustained efforts by child homelessness experts that have led to heightened attention and short-term funding for students experiencing homelessness and the significant barriers K-12 schools face in identifying them. That focus has not always included the youngest Californians — infants and toddlers — in part because the state’s early learning system is far more fragmented.

This data from SchoolHouse Connection, an organization that advocates for homeless students, and Poverty Solutions, a University of Michigan initiative to prevent and alleviate poverty, was shared with EdSource ahead of the Sept. 23 release of their third on the prevalence of homelessness among children 0 to 3 nationwide.

The nearly 86,000 homeless infants and toddlers were 5.19% of about 1.6 million children ages 0 to 3 in 2023-24. The number is an estimate, taken by looking at the percentage of first grade students who were identified as homeless during the 2023-24 year and applying it to the census age group percentages for children ages 0 to 3.��

To get to the number of children accessing early childhood programs, the researchers looked at enrollment data from Early Head Start, home visiting programs and local educational agencies, which are required to identify younger children experiencing homelessness if they receive federal funding.

Some children might have been identified and are simply not reflected in the estimate, in part because data access is extremely limited and fragmented across multiple public agencies, say the researchers.��

Student homelessness across the K-12 system has risen 4% in the most recent data available. In years prior, it rose by up to 15%, according to state data.��

Child homelessness experts contend the rise in student homelessness reflects several factors, including California’s skyrocketing cost of living and the end of pandemic-era housing protections.��

At the same time, they point to short-term infusions of funding that have helped schools improve data collection systems and identification practices that allowed them to begin supporting more students.��

Homeless liaisons have attributed many of those gains to of $800 million for schools nationwide, of which California received $98.76 million. The one-time pandemic-era funding was dedicated entirely to identifying and supporting students experiencing homelessness.��

Child homelessness experts say data shows the funding worked: after what appeared as a significant dip in student homelessness rates at the peak of the pandemic, there was a sharp increase once schools reopened. They attribute this dramatic shift to the identification efforts by liaisons, who by then had the funding to hire staff to make phone calls to families they knew were struggling, distribute gas cards to help families get their children to school, pay for emergency temporary housing for evicted families and more.�� 

The closest California has come to matching those pandemic-era dollars is approved by the state Legislature this year. It will support identification efforts, though it remains unclear how the state will distribute the funding.

“The state’s really going to have to be targeted about where this money goes, and I think a set-aside amount for identifying our youngest learners makes a ton of sense because that $116 million is not going to reach everybody,” said Joseph Bishop, executive director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools.��

But experts warn that without long-term funding to maintain those efforts in the TK-12 system, it will be even more difficult to build similar identification capacity in the early learning space to ensure children 0-3 can also be connected to services they need as their families find permanent housing. At the same time, they foresee that more children are likely to be in need in coming years.

“Given what we know about worsening economic conditions, we can certainly surmise that families with children, in particular, have been impacted by housing instability and homelessness,” said Patterson. “The tricky part, though, is pandemic funds are gone, and that means the capacity to identify has dwindled in many places, so we might be entering a phase where we see homelessness increasing, but identification is scaling back because of limited capacity, both in early childhood programs and among local educational agencies.”

Why counting homeless infants and toddlers is tough — and why it matters

Not only is the data from SchoolHouse Connection and Poverty Solutions likely an undercount, but there are other factors that affect the ability to identify students. The early childhood services system in the state is more fractured than K-12, say researchers. And, there may be limited knowledge of the responsibility of local education agencies to identify and support homeless students.

Knowledge of how the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act applies to early learning programs is also less widespread. The law requires local education agencies, such as school districts and certain preschools, to identify and support homeless students, including those younger than 4, which is the age for entering transitional kindergarten.

How does the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act help?

When McKinney-Vento was enacted decades ago, it established a broader definition of homelessness for students. For example, the law considers a student homeless if they are staying with relatives or in temporary housing due to economic hardship, loss of housing or a similar reason.��

The law can apply to preschools under specific circumstances, including when a program is funded by a local education agency, like a school district. provides some detail into whether an early learning program might be a McKinney-Vento preschool.��

And if a homeless liaison identifies a homeless student with an infant or toddler sibling, the federal act requires them to refer the young child to early learning programs.

Even when McKinney-Vento does not directly apply, many early learning programs have adopted its broader definition of homelessness and require certain exceptions be made for homeless families. This could include allowing a child to begin attending the program while providing a grace period for families to produce enrollment documentation or giving priority enrollment to homeless families.

An apparent disconnect between early learning and the TK-12 school system

Child education experts have noted a disconnect between early learning programs and the TK-12 school system, where homeless liaisons are already stretched thin.��

“There’s a major flaw in not having those systems in place, and I think it can make the work of districts potentially more effective if we had earlier identification,” said Bishop of UCLA. “We don’t know or have the continuity across systems to know where kids are coming from, even sometimes within districts, let alone before TK.”

Bishop’s team published a report last week finding that were enrolled in California’s TK-12 public school system in the 2024-25 school year. This is an additional nearly 30,000 more students than what they estimated prior to the pandemic in 2018-19.��

While the report did not include children experiencing homelessness who were enrolled in early learning programs — Bishop said his team wanted to include them but faced challenges obtaining the data — it found that many of the highest counts of homeless students were in elementary school districts.��

Anticipating “where the need is coming from” via better identification and data collection could help districts better support their students.��

“We’re sometimes shocked when students are struggling academically” once they reach elementary school, said Bishop. “That’s the ripple effect of not having the early warning systems.”

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Davis often heard from family and friends that Juri was smart and she should consider enrolling her granddaughter in preschool early.

And a new literacy screening at one of her granddaughter’s primary care checkups confirmed it.

In recent years, literacy has become an issue that’s extended far beyond the classroom and a child’s home, reaching government — and now hospitals.

At six of Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s 13 clinics, in Columbus, Ohio, 3 to 5 year olds are receiving reading screenings during their pediatric visits. Since 2022, more than 7,000 children have received the screenings.

“When kids come into their primary care pediatrician, if they’re coming into all of their checkups, they would come in 15 times before they start kindergarten,” said Sara Bode, medical director of school-based health at Nationwide Children’s. “That was a really opportune setting for us to really think about where we are in intervening, assessing or understanding where kids are with their literacy and supporting that from the clinic.” 

The 5-minute screenings are done annually at the beginning of a regular check up by a team of “Kindergarten Readiness Coordinators,” who are former early childhood educators and now work at the hospital.

The screening does not check for learning disabilities, but can identify some challenges with language development. The screening mainly focuses on foundational skills that are learned at home through activities like reading with a parent before bed or letter games.

By doing a small read aloud with a board book, the coordinators assess a child’s letter and shape recognition, rhyming and fine motor skills — like turning a page. Afterward, they’re able to tell parents if their child is ahead, on track or needs additional support, providing an opportunity for early intervention well before a child enters a formal classroom setting.

“We have light bulb moments. … One is in a good way when we do this literacy screening and the child is knocking it out of the park … and the parents are like ‘I didn’t even know they could do this,’” Bode said. “Another light bulb moment is when kids are struggling and parents will say to us ‘I had no idea they were supposed to know these things before kindergarten,’ and we’re like ‘That’s OK. That’s why we’re doing this now, because at the age of 3 … you have all the time in the world.’ ”

The coordinators provide learning kits with different reading materials including magnetic letters and activity books. Coordinators maintain a relationship with families in the weeks, months and years to come, with additional resources like care coordination to get students enrolled in preschool, access to library readings and where to find adult education programs if a parent struggles with reading.

Families are given a personalized literacy plan, with checklists for parents to go over where their child is performing well and where they can improve. Check-ins after the initial screening occur a month and three months later, with updated assessments when the child turns four and five.

“Most of our parents, if you ask them, ‘What should your child know? What are those early literacy skills before kindergarten?’ they can’t really tell you,” Bode said, “So, this is just a real learning opportunity.”

For families, like Davis, the guidance is a helpful launching pad.

“I didn’t know where to start,” Davis said, adding that while she read to her granddaughter often, she didn’t feel like she “had the right materials to get her started the right way.”

“When you’re at home, you just think of things that you think the child would need to know, but with a coordinator, … you’re given things you should be working on. … It’s good to know I’m not jumping ahead or giving her too much that she doesn’t need now,” Davis said. “The screening really helped me get focused and to engage more with my granddaughter with different techniques.”

The majority of the children are from low-income backgrounds, Bode said, adding that the primary care clinic serves more than 85% of people and families who are on Medicaid or uninsured with “many kids who are really struggling on these assessments.”

“These clinics are all chosen because they’re in locations where, typically, we can tell by the school district, that a lot of the kids don’t start school ready,” Bode said.

Across Columbus Public Schools, about 64% of third grade children are not reading on grade level, according to , but hospital staff are hopeful early intervention is beginning to move the needle.

In Ohio, kindergarten students are required to take a at the beginning of the school year that measures social-emotional development, physical well-being and skills in literacy and math.

Recent data from the hospital found its first cohort of 332 students had over a 71% passage rate compared to the district’s average of 60%.

In the of Columbus, a predominately Black and low-income area, only 22% of children pass the readiness assessment on average, but children who partook in the screening process were over 70%, Bode said.

“We’re getting these kids connected because these are some of our highest risk populations,” Bode said. “We’re really seeing gains where we’re able to intervene, connect them to programs, teach parents what to do at home and it’s actually now translating to their language and literacy scores when they get to kindergarten.”

With the help of the kindergarten readiness coordinators, Juri has been enrolled in a local preschool for a year, where she’s ahead of the curriculum.

“She has grown from knowing her name to writing her full name. … She writes A through Z. She knows her sight words. She can write her birthday,” Davis said. “Juri has an advantage because [our clinic] saw she was ready at 3. … By the time she gets to kindergarten, she’s going to be ready. She’s going to be advanced.”

Bode is hopeful the screenings will expand to all of the hospital’s 13 locations and that it’ll work with national initiatives like , a program that gives children books at every pediatric visit and , which gifts kids books from birth to 5.

“There’s a big difference between not being delayed and being ready for school and thriving, and I do think there’s a gap and misunderstanding in the medical field about what is needed,” Bode said. “So this idea of mixing health and education is just so important … because if a kid’s not ready for kindergarten, then they are more likely to fail that third-grade reading test, then they’re less likely to graduate and their adult health outcomes are probably more affected by that than anything I’m treating in the clinic.”

Bornfreund — a senior fellow at New America, where she previously was director of early and elementary education policy — shines a light on academic pressure on young children. In her book, she digs into the history of kindergarten and how it’s changed, chronicles her visits to over 50 classrooms in 13 states, and speaks to education and policy experts about ideas for transforming kindergarten to prioritize how kids learn best.

Kindergarten is regarded as the connector between pre-K and early elementary grades, but Bornfreund views the entire journey from pre-K through third grade as critical for young children’s development. 

In order for these years to lay a sturdy foundation for everything that follows, the kindergarten experience should , including connections with peers and teachers. Over the years, however, kindergarten has become increasingly according to Bornfreund, particularly in the aftermath of the No Child Left Behind Act, which became federal law in 2002. “The new emphasis on testing and accountability under the law put pressure on schools and teachers to achieve at higher levels for each child,” she wrote.

The book laments the state of kindergarten today, where classroom experiences are overly scripted and funding is insufficient in many communities. At the same time, Bornfreund finds teachers who are providing meaningful experiences for young learners against the odds. In the conversation below, she shares her perspective on what a strong kindergarten experience looks like and offers insights on how schools, families and policymakers can reshape kindergarten to help children thrive. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why are children entering kindergarten with such a wide range of abilities?

That kindergarten year is the first accessible-to-all opportunity into formal public education. Even as widespread as pre-K has become, not everyone has access to that public opportunity, but every child does have access to kindergarten. If they attended a high-quality pre-K, the kindergarten year can often be somewhat of a repeat for them. If they were in childcare or any other kind of early childhood environment, it’s going to be pretty jarring. Or if they didn’t have any formal preschool experience at all, it can be fairly jarring. And so there does need to be more attention to … all the different types of experiences that children have before they get into kindergarten.

What are the key differences between children who have had some kind of formal experience before kindergarten and those who have not? 

While pre-K often does build early literacy and numeracy skills, it’s also focused on the whole child. So the executive function that helps students to be able to sit and listen and line up and understand what it means to wait their turn, but also the social and emotional development. And that is one of the areas that is lacking in a lot of kindergarten [classrooms], not because teachers don’t understand that it’s important or don’t want to be able to focus more on the whole child, but because the schedule in many places … is so rigid, and the expectations of what teachers should be doing with students in kindergarten classrooms don’t allow for time to focus on those whole-child areas. 

Where did you find school districts that draw upon the research with the most fidelity?

The really transformed, starting with pre-K, and built their own curriculum. It’s called the focused on preschool, pre-K, kindergarten and they’ve also gone up to second grade.�� … It engages students in a lot of playful learning practices, and it has a heavy focus on not just building those reading skills, but also building the background knowledge opportunities for children to talk and interact with each other. Boston has really transformed the majority of their elementary schools now, and that has spread. Those approaches have spread to other parts of Massachusetts as well as Maine. The Focus Curriculum is open source, so anyone can take and use it or adapt it for their state specifics or regional differences.��

Is it a more rigorous academic program or is it more play-based? 

Both. It’s aligned with Massachusetts standards, and it incorporates within the curriculum these play-based approaches. 

And that’s something you’d like to see spread more widely? 

Yes. Or other curriculum materials like that. And I would just say [that] for young kids, including kindergarten through at least second grade, the play-based approach is the rigor for those kids, because it’s how they learn best, when looking at the science of early learning and development. And it doesn’t mean free play, that kids are just doing whatever all day … Looking at Boston, that play-based learning is guided play. Teachers are curating the kinds of materials that are in different center activities. They are moving around the room when children are engaged in those activities, asking probing questions to … support children in using different vocabulary or getting at the specific standard that teachers are wanting to focus on in those particular centers. So it’s structured, it’s guided by the teacher and it’s rigorous. 

What’s your perspective on delaying kindergarten, as some experts recommend, especially for boys?

I would say that the problem isn’t that 5-year-old boys aren’t ready for kindergarten, or that some kids aren’t ready for kindergarten. It’s that kindergarten has become unready for 5-year-olds. Five-year-olds are active social learners, particularly young boys … and kindergarten teachers aren’t able to — or, in some cases, aren’t sure how to — deliver those active social learning opportunities. That’s the real challenge. So red shirting … or holding kids back a year isn’t going to solve that problem. 

Why is relationship-building so important in kindergarten classrooms?

Before children can learn from their teachers, they have to be able to trust them. That’s not a nice-to-have. Those relationships have to be in place between the teacher and the student, regardless of the grade, but it’s particularly important in kindergarten, when many children are coming together for the first time with another adult or with other children. They’re a core piece of that learning. 

How does technology support relationships and play? Or does it interfere?

I visited several classrooms in different places where children are on tablets … for much of the day or for too much of the day. There’s a place for technology. I think some of the programs that children are using are suited for supporting differentiation or just meeting specific skills that children are developing. … But the technology doesn’t build relationships. They’re a tool, not a teacher, and we shouldn’t treat them in schools as if they can replace a teacher and a relationship. 

Were there classrooms you walked into while writing this book and you were like, “Aha, this is it. This is what it ought to be like”? 

There were a lot where I felt like I just wanted to stay all day, but in this one particular room [in Maine], I got into the classroom before students started coming in, and as students were coming in, the teacher was greeting them and asking them questions. This was a Monday. One question she asked was, “How did that softball game go this weekend?” … She was just picking up on things that she knew about students and digging in and asking them how certain things went and following up on that. And then students, during their morning work as everyone was coming in, there had been strong routines built because they knew exactly what they were going to be doing. They got their … morning STEM toys out, and they were sitting at tables and doing different things with their table mates. And that was just more of a before the day started free activity, a lot of choice in that, but kids were talking, they were working together. … Then they came together for their morning meeting. … That start of the day is a really important way to help children feel welcome and ready to learn and ready to be in a community with both their teacher and fellow classmates.

What else stood out from your travels?

I visited a classroom in Oklahoma [and] the teacher noticed the energy of her class was dipping. Her kids needed a break. So she called [for] a little dance party — two minutes to help everybody reset — and then got back to what her instruction was. In Ferndale, Washington, the superintendent has made play-based learning a priority for the whole district in kindergarten, and they’re moving it up to first grade too. The way that works is, there’s an hour of dedicated time that follows reading instruction. The students are essentially taking what they’ve learned in that reading block and then applying it to play-based learning. 

What’s one recommendation for making the transition from pre-K to kindergarten smoother?

One thing I would say is to give pre-K through first grade teachers dedicated time to plan together. … Having that dedicated time to think together and to plan together is one of the most high-leverage things that schools can do. Teachers appreciate it too.

What advice do you have for parents? 

Ask questions about what kindergarten looks like. What opportunities are there for play-based learning, for building relationships, for science? One of the things I point out is that science is almost all but gone from a lot of kindergarten classrooms because there’s just not the time for it. So really probing and asking those kinds of questions of the teacher, but also of the principal is important for parents to be doing. 

What about policymakers?

Kindergarten is really the only grade where we fund it like an afterthought, but then [we] call it this important foundation. We should invest in what it takes to deliver on the teaching and learning that aligns with how we know students learn.

The program, which comes at no cost to families, added a new, pre-kindergarten grade level to public school districts throughout the state. The 2026-27 school year marks the second full year that all 4-year-olds in California are eligible for TK. 

It is, in many respects, a boon for families and the state. But for early care and education providers — many of whom have long depended on the lower cost of serving preschoolers to help offset the more expensive work of caring for infants and toddlers — the siphoning of 4-year-olds from their enrollment represents an existential threat to their businesses and, they say, the health of the sector and variety of options available to families statewide. 

Already, some private preschools have closed their doors permanently; others are trying — and often struggling — to pivot to serve younger children. 

“Parents will likely have fewer choices for pre-K in the long run,” said Anna Powell, associate director of research and policy at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley. “If we sort of accept that the 4s and 5s will move into TK, many providers will not be able to serve 3s and younger. If that happens, we could see fewer options for younger children as well.”

Details of the challenges that TK has created for California providers are captured in her organization’s , which used data collected from a survey of 10,000 early childhood educators and focus groups with center directors and family childcare providers. 

TK expansion is just one piece of California’s — it’s even just one element in the Master Plan to achieve universal pre-K for all 4-year-olds — but it is the one that has received the most attention and investment by far, said Powell, lead author of the report. 

“TK has reached critical mass,” she said. “What started as a trickle is now a tidal wave of movement. We have to reckon with that as a state.”

In the 2025-26 school year, when all California children who turned 4 years old by Sept. 1 became eligible, about 52% of the eligible TK population had — more than 200,000 children, according to the California Budget and Policy Center. 

“This might seem like not a big deal,” Powell added, noting that many people wonder why early care and education programs who have lost 4- and 5-year-olds can’t just pivot to care for more infants and toddlers. “The business model has been calibrated where 4s and 5s are the biggest and most stable group. When you start to tinker with that, it can really raise problems for providers.”

California is to roll out free, universal preschool for 4-year-olds, although no program ends up looking the same, given the fragmented system of early care and education in the United States, noted Powell. California’s approach of adding a new grade level to schools and making that the “one free choice” for families inevitably pits the public option versus the private ones. 

An alternative, such as one , supports the mixed-delivery system of early care and education; the state pays licensed providers across a range of settings — such as centers, homes and schools — to serve 4-year-olds and lets families choose which setting best fits their needs. 

So when the public option is free, it becomes hard for private providers to find a winning argument with the families of 4-year-olds. 

That was true for Heather Posner. 

Posner is the former director of the , which closed permanently on June 12 after losing too much of its enrollment to the public TK program, she said. In the three years leading up to its full implementation in fall 2025, “I lost a preschool classroom every year,” Posner said. Her enrollment went from 30 kids one year, to 20 the next, and finally to 10 children last school year, she said. When the spring term ended, the school shut down. 

The garden school was licensed to serve children from age 2 to 6. Posner’s plan had been to “pick up extra 2s,” creating classrooms for younger 2-year-olds and older ones. But between a low birth rate, hiring extra staff and all of the changes she would have had to make to the space to comply with licensing requirements for serving younger children, it just didn’t seem feasible. 

“It was kind of a double whammy,” Posner said of losing older kids and being unable to adapt easily to serve the younger ones. 

In early care and education, staffing makes up the vast majority of a program’s costs. States set requirements for adult-to-child ratios based on age, since younger children typically need more attention and care. At a center-based program in California, three adults are required to care for 12 infants, while only one adult is needed to care for 12 4-year-olds. While childcare costs for infants tend to be higher than for preschoolers, it is not three times as high. As a result, older children help subsidize the cost of caring for younger children in many programs. 

Because of the challenges inherent in caring for infants and toddlers (defined as children under age 3), only one quarter of childcare centers in California are licensed to serve that age group, CSCCE found. The majority of programs, including the now-closed Carquinez Garden School, focus on serving older kids. 

Programs cannot pivot to serving infants and toddlers overnight, providers told CSCCE. Not only does it require more staff, it requires staff with different expertise and experience. 

“Our past research shows becoming an infant/toddler teacher is not a priority for preschool teachers,” said Powell. “Preschool teaching is an identity.”

Even for center-based administrators who want to make the switch, it’s not as simple as saying yes. Programs designed for older children typically have playground equipment higher off the ground that is not safe for children crawling or new to walking. They have fewer changing areas than would be needed for younger children. Prices would also need to be raised on parents to help afford the additional teachers. “All of those things would be necessary along the way,” Powell explained. Several program leaders who have applied for a license to serve younger children told CSCCE they’re still in a queue with the state licensing division, waiting to get approved.

Family child care providers, who work out of their homes, face another set of constraints.

Rachel Bymun is the owner and director of Luv Muffins Preschool & Childcare, which she has run with her husband for the past 17 years. It is licensed as a large family childcare, meaning they can serve up to 14 kids. Only four of those children, however, can be under age 2, according to state licensing requirements. 

So even if Bymun wanted to transition to serving more infants and toddlers, she and other home-based providers are strictly limited in how many they can take. 

“Really everyone is struggling, maybe for slightly different reasons,” Powell said of providers. “None of them can beat the trend and keep their 4-year-olds.”

Many are trying anyway, though. Bymun is one of the California providers who has been dabbling in marketing and education with families, she said. 

“We are trying to be more diligent about how we explain our program and what we do,” she said, adding that she feels strongly that her program has several advantages over TK, even if the public program is free. 

For one, most traditional early care and education programs have smaller class sizes than TK. That means each child gets more attention and engagement from teachers, Bymun said. Another is that many children start in Bymun’s program and have “continuity of care from 0 to 5,” which she finds meaningful. Then there’s the fact that most TK programs are half-day, which is not a childcare solution for working parents; they still need to find another arrangement for their child for the second part of the day. 

TK is also more structured and academic. Some families now believe that, by age 4, that’s what their child needs to be “kindergarten ready,” Bymun said. But she rejects the idea that “a kid needs to be able to do a worksheet, sit at a desk and be quiet. We all know that’s not how kids learn, and it’s not best practice.” 

Bymun’s program is nature-based and takes place primarily outdoors. Everything from reading, to dramatic play, to math instruction is held outside. That creates a stark contrast between her program setting and a school-based one, she said. 

Still, what Bymun and countless other California providers have found is that, even with their upsides, it’s hard to compete with free. Bymun’s preschool program is $360 per week for a 4-year-old, or about $18,000 a year. That’s a hard pill to swallow for a family who could otherwise choose the no-cost public TK option. 

“There’s going to be a lot more of us closing down, as it gets harder and harder to compete with ‘free’ and compete with the marketing of, ‘Your kids should go to TK,’” Bymun said. 

Bymun was able to make inroads with her current families this year. She has 13 kids enrolled and is considered “full.” One is school-aged, four are under age 2, and the rest are in that 2- to 5-year range, she said. This is the first year that she’d been able to convince her families with 4-year-olds to stay in her program instead of leaving for TK, she said. Next year, she said, could be a different story. 

“People are ultimately price sensitive,” said Powell of CSCCE. “Even if they had a wonderful experience when their child was 3, it ends up not being much of a choice after all.”

It’s not too late for the state and counties to step in to support providers during this period of upheaval and transition, Powell said. They could provide grants so teachers can get trained on working with children from birth to age 3 and programs can convert their facilities and equipment to better serve younger children. The state could focus on reducing turnaround times for centers that need to update their licensing to serve younger children. The state could increase reimbursement rates for providers who accept children whose families pay with subsidies. And the state could give more attention to the other pillars of its universal preschool strategy — not just TK. 

The impact on providers throughout the state is already being felt, Powell said, but “California doesn’t have to sit back and let this happen.”

Multiple surveys of American parents over the past few years have revealed that pressures are mounting. In Stress in America 2023, an annual survey conducted by the American Psychological Association, parents were more likely than other adults to report certain stressors; reported that on most days, their stress is completely overwhelming. In April 2025, more than of parents of young children indicated experiencing emotional distress, according to data from the RAPID Survey Project. A survey published in May by New America found that who have children under age 6 expressed that they wished they had more quality time with their children. 

With this reality for parents, it’s no wonder that debates over the American childcare sector are intensifying as the midterm elections approach. 

A recent report, , reveals that in the absence of a functional childcare system that meets their needs, many families rely on a patchwork of informal and formal care for their babies and young kids. More than two-thirds of children under age 5, the analysis found, receive care from a relative and grandparents play a large and growing part in this picture, with nearly half of children under age 5 cared for by a grandparent.

Authored by economist Sarah Jane Glynn and published by the Roosevelt Institute, the report draws upon 2023 data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s , a longitudinal survey that provides detailed information on families’ childcare arrangements as well as income, employment, household composition and government program participation. Over the years, the U.S. Census Bureau has released reports on childcare using data from the survey, but the most recent version was published in 2013 with data gathered in 2011. Glynn’s analysis compares the data from 2023 with the data from 2011. 

: “Families are assembling care from the options available to them. A week of care might include a grandparent, an after-school program or a parent watching a child while trying to work. Some arrangements fit a family’s needs. Others reflect a more difficult reality of formal care that may be too expensive, too far away, or unavailable when parents need it.”

In the interview below, Glynn, whose career includes time with the U.S. Department of Labor and the Center for American Progress, highlights how the current childcare economy differs from the more traditional center-based model often reflected in legislation and political debate. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When analyzing the data, what are the big patterns you noticed?

The biggest change has to do with mothers reporting that they’re caring for their children at the same time that they’re doing other things. More than six times as many moms are saying that in 2023, relative to 2011. 

Do you anticipate that this trend will continue?

I think some of that is going to be sticky, honestly. We have seen some shifts in terms of expectations and the ways that people are organizing their work lives and their personal lives. And you can spin that in multiple ways. Whether it’s viewed as a positive or a negative, I think depends on perspective. 

Does this obligation of simultaneous work and caregiving represent a new way of balancing the economy on the backs of women?

Absolutely. And I think the age of the children really matters a lot here too, because if you’re thinking about a parent who’s a mom in her home office working, and her 8-year-old or 9-year-old is at the kitchen table working on homework in the afternoon after they’ve come home from school, technically, that mom is still supervising her child in some way. She’s still in the house. It’s what time-use researchers would call “secondary childcare.” You’re sort of supervising the kid and that you’re home if there’s an emergency or something, but you’re not actively engaging with them in the same way you would with a younger child. But we still see really high rates of moms reporting that they’re caring for their kid while they’re working or otherwise busy for children who are under 5. 

When you’ve got over a quarter of mothers saying that they’re watching their child who is under 5 while they’re working or doing something else, that is, to me, a very striking finding and is showing just how incredibly stretched those moms are, because that’s a lot to be juggling at the same time. You’re working, you’re going to school, you’re doing something else that requires your full attention and you’re taking care of a baby, a toddler, a preschooler. 

What other pressures are parents of young children facing?

Childcare prices have gone up at rates that are higher and faster than overall inflation. Everything has gotten more expensive, but childcare has gotten even more expensive in ways that are not just about what’s been happening across the economy more broadly. And there’s just extreme shortages in a lot of places where there are not enough slots. … Those waitlists can be really long. And anecdotally, I know people whose kids were entering pre-K when they finally got a call from the daycare center that they’d been on the waitlist for for three or four years.

What are the consequences of this situation?

Nobody wants children to be in an unsafe environment where there aren’t enough teachers, where the ratios are really bad, but that’s the scenario that we’re creating when we continue to erode job quality. Why would somebody want to enter into this field — even if they are passionate about it, deeply skilled and have a background in education — if people get burned out and leave because they can’t afford to continue working as early childhood educators? …

There’s a million different reasons why this is a market failure, but there has to be government intervention, in terms of funding, or we’re never going to be able to solve this problem. … I am heartened because there are multiple bipartisan bills in Congress right now. This is a bipartisan issue. Folks across the political spectrum understand why it’s a problem, that it requires a lot of money and that we’ve got to figure out where that will come from.

Between 2011 and 2023, the years you analyzed data from, there were a number of factors that shaped your findings, including the pandemic and the rise of remote work. What else do you think comes into play? 

Some of them are what I would argue are more overall positive shifts, [including] heightened labor force participation among women, and among mothers specifically. … There were also some negative factors that were pushing folks into the labor force, like increased inflation and rising costs, but we had women and moms who, in other times might not have worked — who might have stayed home — going into the labor force during that time period. But you also have, at the same time, a lot of issues in terms of accessing childcare. We saw the number of childcare centers decline during the pandemic. A lot of those rebounded. There were a lot of efforts and a lot of money that was pumped into childcare as a result of pandemic spending to try to fix that problem. 

But the funding didn’t last.

No, it wasn’t sustained. So that’s part of the problem, too. Do folks have access? How uneven is that access? And so much of this depends on where you live, because there’s so much variation state to state in terms of the investments that are made in childcare access.

Which data trends surprised you?

One of the things that shocked me was how high the rate of grandparent care was. I did not expect to see such a large share of children being routinely regularly cared for by their grandparents. … I think about this in terms of people I know. My parents are not providing day-to-day care for my niece and nephews, but they do end up providing a good amount of childcare. And that’s great for us because my parents are retired. They are healthy and active and able to do that. That is a beneficial choice that my sister and my brother are making for their family when they have grandma and grandpa watching their kids. But for other families, maybe grandma doesn’t want to watch the kids or maybe she’s not in great health or doesn’t have great mobility, but she’s around and she’ll do it for free. And so it may not be the optimal choice that a family would want.

What kinds of research need to happen to build upon the data presented in this report? 

In this research, we’re really focused on the children. The kids are the focus. Where are they? Who’s watching them? The [next step] is looking at the parents and looking at work disruptions as a result of childcare problems. Who’s experiencing a work disruption — whether that’s having to take a day off, having to cut their hours, or having to leave work entirely because they don’t have access to reliable childcare? There were much higher rates of disruption than I expected to see. It was common in a way that really surprised me, even as someone who’s been studying this for over a decade, it still surprised me how frequent this was. The less surprising piece is that it’s mostly moms who end up experiencing those disruptions far more than fathers do. 

What’s the one big takeaway from “Who’s Minding the Kids These Days”?

If you care about the economy and the ability of people to work, then you should care about access to childcare and other forms of care as well, because it prevents people from being able to participate fully in the economy.

Michigan’s initiative to offer free pre-kindergarten for all is paying off, state educators said Wednesday, as the Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement and Potential, also known as MiLEAP, touted nearly 53,000 applications on file since June.

Emily Laidlaw, MiLEAP’s deputy director, said during a virtual news conference that the figure had grown by 700 applications in one month and by 16% compared with the same time last year, when applications totaled more than 45,000 children.

“Our children’s futures are the most important thing we can invest in, and we’re proud of our statewide efforts to get more students enrolled in high-quality pre-K programs,” Laidlaw told reporters Wednesday on a Zoom webinar to announce the Great Start Readiness program’s progress. “In May, we saw over 55,000 children enrolled for the 2025-26 school year, which was an all-time high for pre-K for all. This initiative is being embraced by families across the state because it provides a high-quality early education opportunity at no cost.”

Laidlaw added that with just one child enrolled in the program, families could save $14,000 a year on childcare costs. Those savings were crucial for families navigating high costs of living and a stagnating economy.

The is Michigan’s solution toward getting more kids in classrooms as early as possible, offering free pre-K programs for eligible four-year-olds across the state. It is ranked nationally as a premier pre-K program, offering math, reading and thinking skills training with a mix of play and hands-on activities.

Enrollment priority is given to families at or below 400% of the federal poverty limit, or approximately $128,000 for a family of four.

Laidlaw said that the program is open to all Michiganders, not just low- and middle-income families.

Synthia Britton, MiLEAP’s interim deputy director of early education, said that children who start ahead, stay ahead.

“Pre-K for All is improving hundreds of thousands of lives, which is why we must get the word out about these programs,” Britton said. “As we achieve record-breaking enrollment and applications, we know our efforts are paying off. There are more families across the state that can benefit from Pre-K for All who have not yet enrolled, so we must continue to spread the word about this amazing opportunity.”

Families can learn more about the programs by visiting the state’s Pre-K For All website, or by checking with their local intermediate school districts for enrollment timelines and deadlines.

JoAnne Elkin, an early childhood and early literacy consultant with the Macomb Intermediate School District, said her ISD has more than 4,500 children already enrolled for the upcoming 2026-27 academic year.

“We know from research that when children have a strong start and access to high-quality early learning, they are positioned to reach their full potential throughout their entire educational journey,” Elkin said. “High-quality pre-K promotes consistent attendance and positive school engagement, and it contributes to their success well beyond the early learning years.”

Elkin said that emerging research shows that by age 5, a child’s brain has developed to nearly 90% of adult size, making those early years so important to develop literacy and other key skills.

“Highlighting access to high-quality pre-K is so very important,” Elkin added. “It means that families can go to work knowing their child is in a safe, nurturing environment with caring adults who support their growth and development.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jon King for questions: info@michiganadvance.com.

Before I understood federal funding, program performance standards or the complicated systems that make Head Start possible, I understood what it meant to be a Head Start child.

Years later, I returned, first as a center director and later as a regional director of a Head Start program in Fort Worth, Texas. I have experienced Head Start from both sides: as a child who benefited from the program and as a leader responsible for ensuring other children and families received the same opportunity.

So, when the current administration says its proposed reforms will strengthen Head Start’s core mission by giving local communities greater flexibility, I have a perspective that is both deeply personal and professional. Let me tell you why I know I’m opposed to the changes outlined .

Head Start’s core mission has never simply been about putting more children in classrooms. The program was built on the understanding that a child’s ability to learn is connected to everything happening in that child’s life. That is why Head Start has always been more than early education.

Head Start recognizes that supporting a child often means supporting the entire family so the program offers a number of wraparound services to support families in helping their children thrive. From connecting parents with healthcare, dental care and mental health resources when needed, to providing nutritious meals for children, it’s about working alongside parents in partnership. 

The would dramatically reduce the federal standards that have helped define what families can expect from a Head Start program. 

For decades, Head Start has operated with clear expectations around the comprehensive needs of children. Under this proposal, many of those expectations would no longer be spelled out in the performance standards. Programs would have significantly fewer federal requirements governing how they address healthcare and developmental needs. 

As someone who attended Head Start, I have some of my earliest memories of being cared for in a safe environment by trusted educators and receiving healthy meals each day. For some families with limited resources, knowing their children would receive two nutritious meals and a snack helps ease the burden of choosing between keeping the lights on and providing healthy meals. Head Start also gives parents the opportunity to work while knowing their children are safe, cared for and learning. For my family, Head Start was not simply a place for me to go during the day. It was a support for our entire family.

As someone who has led a Head Start program, I know what these actions look like in practice. It looks like a teacher noticing something about a child and knowing there is a system for responding to the issue. It looks like a family services worker helping a parent navigate resources they may not have known existed. It looks like identifying a concern early enough to intervene. It looks like following up instead of simply handing a parent a referral and hoping for the best. 

Sometimes, Head Start is the first system that truly sees a family. That visibility and acknowledgment can change the trajectory of a child or a family’s life.

The proposed rule would also move away from many of Head Start’s existing expectations for curriculum, teacher development, coaching, classroom size and teacher-child ratios, to rely more heavily on state childcare requirements. 

I have managed Head Start centers and also worked as a preschool teacher. I know what happens when you increase the number of children in a classroom without increasing the number of adults responsible for their care. Someone pays the price. It may be a decrease in the individual attention a child receives, a delay in the teacher’s recognition of a developmental concern or less time available to build relationships with families. Removing any of these standards will have a domino effect. 

I struggle to understand how we can say we are giving communities more power while simultaneously weakening one of the clearest structures through which quality early education exists. 

Children growing up in low-income families do not deserve a lesser standard of early childhood education because it is cheaper to administer. They deserve high-quality classrooms. They deserve teachers who have the capacity to see them. They deserve safe environments. They deserve access to support when they need it. Their parents deserve a voice, and their families deserve to be treated as partners. That is what makes Head Start so successful. That is what contributed to my success. 

For generations, Head Start has represented creating opportunity by investing in the whole child and strengthening the entire family, and we cannot strengthen that mission by stripping away the very things that made it powerful.

I am a product of Head Start, and Head Start did not change my life by doing less.

Under the existing model, one group of kids comes for the morning and another group comes in the afternoon. A full day of care would help working families and provide kids with twice as much time in a trusted learning environment.

Six months later, she’s still awaiting a response, leaving parents in limbo about whether they’ll have childcare for seven hours each day or just 3½, as they prepare to send their children to her program in just three weeks. 

“We’ve been working on enrollment, on recruitment, on getting families into the system,” she said, “(but) families don’t want part day, so at this point, we’re going to have to backtrack.”

Historically, such a request would have gone to a program specialist at Lykins’s regional office, who would have resolved it within about 45 days, she said. But, in January 2025, the Washington regional office was shuttered — along with across the country — consolidating Head Start’s and completely upending the processes program directors had come to rely on. The consolidated regional offices are each responsible for more programs, so now, Lykins reports to a new office that serves far more grantees and has reduced authority and capacity for support.

“It’s a systemic nightmare,” Lykins said, adding that this request was just one of a number “that have not been responded to” over the past year and a half. Ultimately, these delays harm families and lead to additional costs, she said.

Lykins’s experience is hardly unique. In a of 157 Head Start providers from 33 states, about how the challenges they’re facing are impacting children and families, nearly 79% of respondents reported an increase in administrative burden since the closures of regional offices, and 90% reported that the level of ongoing support has declined within the new structure. The survey, conducted by the Washington State Association of Head Start and , a national advocacy campaign, was distributed directly to Head Start program directors nationally. The results showed that these impacts aren’t merely bureaucratic: more than 75% of providers reported that the delays and lack of support have resulted in significant impacts on children, families and staff.

Many providers reported in the survey that significant decision delays have led to increased costs and damaged community partnerships and have left program leaders feeling frustrated and isolated. All respondents had experienced at least one decision delay, and in many cases the delays amounted to double or triple the wait time they used to experience when their regional offices were still functioning.

“When we started reading through the results, what struck us was that it’s not like there’s one big smoking gun here. There’s just so many people who are experiencing so many frustrations and delays that it is really a systemic problem,” said Katy Warren, deputy director of the Washington State Association of Head Start who helped lead the survey. “Every day that a Head Start director goes to work, they don’t know whether they’re going to be able to navigate these systems that used to be fairly smooth,” she said, explaining that providers now wait weeks or months for communication from their regional offices.

The survey results were released just days after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a proposed rule change that would drastically reduce Head Start’s Performance Standards. Kennedy said his department was “removing unnecessary bureaucracy” that would return the program to its roots, but critics argue that if these changes are instituted they will effectively gut Head Start’s core. 

The updated rules eliminate requirements for standards such as low adult-to-child ratios; services such as medical and dental care; developmental screenings and individualized services for children with disabilities. It would also require most programs to conduct all education in English only. A 60-day public comment period is currently open and will run through Oct. 6. 

In many ways, the closures of the regional offices and the proposed rule change go hand-in-hand, according to Warren.

“One of the reasons why we are skeptical about the good intentions of the administration to improve the operations of Head Start programs and services is that we haven’t seen a real commitment to that over the last year,” she said. Staff layoffs, a shift of decision making from the regional offices to the Office of Head Start, and administrative delays — often stemming from a lack of clear and timely communication, have “not indicated a priority of efficiency and effective service to children,” Warren added.

Head Start has come under threat repeatedly since the start of the second Trump administration. In addition to the consolidation of the regional offices, the program has faced proposed funding freezes and delays, and workforce reduction.

Providers and grantees who reported to the shuttered regional offices largely heard about the fallout through word of mouth and panicked texts and LinkedIn posts. Many said they didn’t receive any official notice from the federal government until a boilerplate email arrived in their inboxes two days after the change and a number of them told �鶹��Ʒ they went for months without a replacement program specialist.

In total, the regional staff who were laid off or furloughed — some of whom had worked at the offices for decades — served 22 states, a number of territories, and hundreds of thousands of children, pregnant women and their families. Local program leaders had long relied on specialists within their regional offices to help navigate everything from grant proposals to building repairs.

The recent survey asked providers to share the impacts of a number of these hurdles on the children and families they serve, with a particular focus on the closures of the regional offices. 

“What took 5 minutes now takes hours,” wrote one grantee from Washington.

“I have received no individual support or check in to see how I or the program is doing since the transition,” wrote a new Head Start program director in Illinois.

“It’s a constant whir of panic,” wrote a third from Virginia.

Nearly half of all respondents said delays or uncertainty around funding, along with reduction in staff support from the Office of Head Start has led to difficulty hiring and retaining qualified teaching staff. One-quarter reported additional administrative burden leading to delays in communication with parents and just over 17% reported an inability to purchase or repair equipment.

Lauri Frichtl, executive director of the Illinois Head Start Association, a nonprofit that supports Head Start programs across the state, said that last winter, one of her program’s buildings flooded after pipes froze and burst over the holiday break. She recalled one of the program directors reaching out to the Office of Head Start for assistance, but that help didn’t come in time. Ultimately, they were forced to move forward without federal guidance “because they couldn’t wait,” she said. “You need immediate answers when you’re in that crisis.”

Frichtl said that before the Illinois regional office closed, she received quick and helpful responses to similar issues.

“Usually you had your program specialist and you had a relationship with them and you were in direct contact with them, and you had immediate feedback, and everything worked well. You may not have liked all of their responses, but at least you had feedback,” she said. “Now it’s kind of just up in the air. You wait and see.”

Darcee Kilsdonk, executive director​ of Clackamas County Children’s Commission, a nonprofit organization that runs 13 Head Start centers in Oregon, has also experienced administrative delays and challenges after the loss of her regional office. Last August, following inquiries from parents, she submitted a request to redesign the center’s schedules to align them with local public schools.

Historically, such an application would have been resolved in a month or two, she said. But a year later, she’s still awaiting approval. “Every single month I ask about it. Every single month they say ‘it’s in process.’” 

Eventually, Kilsdonk gave up and decided to prioritize the needs of her families, making the schedule change in defiance of the Office of Head Start. “I was very open with them that I was going to do it anyway,” she said.

Since the closures of regional offices, Kilsdonk said she has wasted an incredible amount of time trying to navigate the new system, including a four-month period during which she had no program specialist assigned to her at all.

“If taxpayers knew what this means to the most vulnerable children and families, I cannot believe that they wouldn’t say, ‘Enough is enough,’” she said.

Not all providers reported such stark changes and turmoil though: Just under 25% of respondents said their program had not experienced related impacts at all.

Wanda Minick, executive director of the Florida Head Start Association, said that in her nine years doing this work, “we’ve always had an issue with communication from our regional office, point blank. There has always been a delay in response.” While Florida’s regional office was spared during the closures, it still faces increased burdens since they’ve taken on additional states. Over the past year and a half, she said the delays have largely “stayed status quo.”

In all, the survey’s findings point to an already stressed system facing mounting hurdles and unpredictability, leaving providers and families unsure about the program’s future.

“It just feels like a huge, heavy blanket over the top of a program,” said Warren. “They’re constantly under this heavy weight of uncertainty and delay.”

In many cases, though, people are looking to move because they want to start or grow their families, said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin, a real estate brokerage &�Բ�����;— making the matter of childcare particularly relevant to their search. 

With housing and childcare for many families’ two biggest expenses — an intersection that Redfin explores in a —  leaders at Redfin have been looking for a way to bring childcare into their own platform for some time.��

Now, they’re debuting a new feature, in partnership with Winnie, a national online childcare marketplace, that gives families visibility into nearby early care and education programs right there on the property listing they’re viewing. 

“Searching for a home often coincides with having a child,” said Fairweather. “If you’re trying to do the calculation on how much house you can afford, it’s helpful to know what your childcare options are before committing to that mortgage.”

Beginning today, Winnie’s childcare data from more than 250,000 licensed early care and education programs nationwide is available on every for-sale property listing on Redfin’s mobile and desktop websites. The integration will be available on Redfin’s mobile application for iOS and Android by the end of September, said Isabelle Novak, a spokesperson for the real estate company. 

The childcare feature will live right alongside the K-12 feature from GreatSchools — a nonprofit that rates schools — that has been available on Redfin for over a decade, Novak added. Prospective buyers, scrolling down a property listing, will see a “K-12” option and a “Preschool & daycare” option.

The “Preschool & daycare” feature pulls the Winnie profiles of nearby providers — including licensed center-, home- and school-based early childhood programs — displaying up to five options along with the ages each program serves and its distance from the home. A buyer can click the name of a previewed program to see a pop-up that offers more details, including a provider’s website URL, hours of operation, description, address, options for financial assistance, language and any parent reviews that have been published to Winnie. 

For further information, buyers can click through to the provider’s profile on the Winnie website, which may have information like available slots and tuition rates, said Sara Mauskopf, CEO and co-founder of Winnie. Winnie pulls from public state licensing databases to create provider profiles on its site, Mauskopf said. From there, providers can update their pages with additional information. About a quarter of the 250,000 provider pages on Winnie have been claimed, Mauskopf added, and providers who are active on the Winnie platform will frequently update the number and type of open spaces they have in their program, since it can change “day-to-day.” 

Mauskopf believes this partnership will be very valuable to young families for whom “childcare is a necessity, not a nice-to-have,” she said. 

“I think it’s really critical for families to be thinking about childcare upfront and not as an afterthought,” she said.

Mauskopf, a mom of three, recalled that when she and her husband were trying to find a home in their area, their focus was on home prices, not care options. After they’d moved, they ended up “scrambling at the last minute to secure childcare,” even having to consider whether one of them would need to step away from work until they could find childcare for their kids. 

That’s as important for families moving to quiet rural areas as it is for those in large metro areas, she said. They will want to know if they have many options or few, and if those are within walking distance or require a drive. 

“One of the things we know is true is that there are sometimes areas where there is no childcare nearby — childcare deserts,” Mauskopf said, referencing often used to describe areas that lack access to licensed programs. “Those might actually be affordable places to live,” she added, but if care is sparse or unavailable, that could be a dealbreaker for some families. The new feature can help families see whether there are care options near the home they’re eyeing. 

Indeed, Novak at Redfin said that the childcare integration will only show providers within a 10-mile radius of the address. If there are none, a message will appear noting that no programs were found within that distance of the home. 

One detail that many families will be seeking is the cost of childcare in a given area. Unfortunately, Mauskopf said, a lot of early care and education programs still require families to tour the space before sharing prices, “which is crazy,” she said. “It’s unlike any market.” 

That may soon change, though. She has recently to a shift in the industry, in which providers are starting to post tuition information publicly — a change likely driven by the fact that families are asking AI about program rates, she noted. 

“A lot of providers, for the first time, are willing to list prices online, since AI will just give you an answer anyway,” Mauskopf said. 

A majority of programs are still requiring parents to come in first, she said, but there’s increasing willingness to share costs upfront. She hopes that shift will continue and can soon be reflected in the Redfin integration so families can have a complete picture of their costs before making a move.

The Trump administration is pushing a total overhaul of Head Start that could fundamentally reshape the 60-year-old program that has provided childcare and key support for America’s lowest-income families.

A released last week put more than 1,400 regulatory provisions that govern how Head Start is implemented on the chopping block. Across the country, 1,600 Head Start grant recipients provide quality care for disadvantaged children, as well as support for families by connecting them to health insurance, job training, developmental screenings, specialist referrals and postpartum support.

This latest proposal is aimed at cutting red tape and allowing more flexibility in the programs, the administration said.

“There’s 1,600 providers across the country facing different conditions, and our proposed rule will reduce their paperwork. It will streamline duplicative statutory requirements and give them flexibility for things like personnel and workforce decisions, as well as licensing relief,” said Alex Adams, the assistant secretary at the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), on a call with reporters.

But Head Start providers and experts say the proposal may actually make it harder for programs to operate and transform Head Start to look more like commercial childcare than an anti-poverty program.

“Families lose the assurance that Head Start means the same thing everywhere, and taxpayers lose a clear measure of impact that Head Start funding should have,” said Celena Roldan Sarillo, the president of Start Early, a nonprofit that advocates for quality early learning.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on a call with reporters to announce the changes that “it is important to protect” Head Start, which is administered by HHS and was created in part by Kennedy’s uncle Sargent Shriver during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. Kennedy wants to see more nutrition and physical activity requirements added to Head Start, and agrees the new rules could streamline it and open seats for more children.

That messaging, however, is misleading, said Yvette Sanchez Fuentes, the senior vice president at Start Early.

“At first glance, these proposed changes might not seem so terrible, but as you dig deeper into it, what we will find is that there really are a lot of changes that will impact what is the heart of Head Start,” Sanchez Fuentes said, adding that the performance standards are not just red tape, “they really are the foundation for how we ensure that programs across the country are supporting children, families and communities in the way that they want best.”

Here is a breakdown of what the administration is proposing to change for Head Start.

Overall, how is this proposal changing Head Start? 

Fundamentally, the changes would have Head Start operate much more like other childcare centers under state and local rules. Because quality is such an important benchmark in Head Start, its rules are more stringent than the rules governing other childcare options — in many places, those differences would disappear.

“States didn’t design their childcare programs to serve the population that Head Start serves. They design those to regulate private businesses and set a floor for safety, like they regulate hospitals or restaurants, not to prepare a high-need community for school,” said Katie Hamm, who oversaw the Head Start program under the Biden administration.

Are there any immediate impacts to my child’s Head Start program? 

No. The public has until October 6 to comment on the proposed rule before HHS reviews the comments and issues a final rule. That review process can take time — months or longer — in addition to any legal challenges that may arise, so it’s unlikely, though not impossible, for changes to happen this year.

How would classrooms change? 

One of the biggest changes in the proposal is eliminating Head Start’s teacher-to-student ratios. One of Head Start’s quality initiatives is that it offers more individualized care — each teacher is in charge of a smaller number of students than in most other childcare settings. The policy is both about safety and support for low-income kids, some of whom need more focused attention.

Under the proposed changes, an estimated of children currently in Head Start would be subject to worse ratios. The maximum number of toddlers per teacher in nine states: Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina and Texas.

The proposal also removes the cap on group sizes, so it’s likely classrooms would have more children.

Another big change: All instruction will have to take place in English instead of offering bilingual support to children who are not native speakers. in Head Start come from homes where a language other than English is spoken.

The only exception is for Head Start programs on Tribal lands.

Are there any changes that impact health and safety? 

Yes.

Detailed requirements on how to prevent lead exposure are gone and replaced with a broader requirement that programs prevent children from being exposed to lead in water and paint in however way they see fit.

A requirement that a bus monitor be on board any buses transporting children at all times has also been removed.

Other detailed rules on facilities, safety training, hygiene, disaster preparedness and equipment and materials are also gone; instead programs are instructed to follow state laws in those areas.

Is discipline changing under the new regulations? 

Currently, children generally cannot be expelled from Head Start. The proposed rule would remove that prohibition and allow programs to set their own disciplinary rules, as long as they align with state and local requirements. Head Start would still need to provide children with any behavioral problems with screenings and referral services.

The administration said it made these changes because when the expulsion and suspension rules were first implemented in 2016, many states did not have their own rules governing those issues. Since then, many states have adopted their own.

“These proposed changes are not an endorsement of suspension and expulsion as approaches to address persistent and serious behavioral concerns; rather, the intent is to allow programs to determine their own discipline policies, within the context of state and local licensing requirements,” the rule says.

Are there changes related to health support? 

Head Start typically offers a variety of mental health and health screenings as part of its program requirements. For example, of enrollment, programs have to check that a family has insurance or ongoing medical care; within 45 days it needs to check for or conduct vision and hearing screenings; within 90 days, it needs to check on whether children have immunizations up to date, have had their well-child pediatrician checkup and had dental visits. Programs also require that children brush their teeth at school. All of those specific requirements are gone under the proposed rule.

Many mental health supports, such as a monthly mental health consultation, would go away.

So while the requirement from the Head Start Act — that programs support families with a comprehensive array of health services — remains, the set rules on how to achieve that, like the timeline requirements, disappear. Advocates say this could lead to inconsistent care and less accountability.

How does this impact children with disabilities? 

Similarly, the proposed rules require that Head Start programs comply with all applicable federal and state regulations in providing services to children with disabilities, but eliminates much of the structure for how to provide those services.

What about impacts on unhoused children? 

The proposed rule removes a provision that allows families experiencing homelessness to simply confirm their situation and thus qualify for Head Start. Families that are unhoused may also be in situations where they are living with someone else or in a temporary structure — situations they could rarely prove through documentation.

Under the new rules, families and children would have to provide some documentation.

Would newborn and pregnancy services be impacted? 

Yes. Early Head Start, which services low-income pregnant people and children under the age of 3, would lose a lot of tailored requirements. Newborn home visits would still be required, for example, but the requirement that they happen within two weeks of birth was dropped.

Also gone is a requirement around addressing racial and ethnic disparities in birth outcomes. Currently, programs must track demographic data on pregnant people, identify any disparities and provide services to close those gaps. The administration said cutting that requirement is in line with its mission to cut back on diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and claims programs said it was beyond the scope of what they could reasonably be expected to do.

Would parent involvement change? 

Possibly.

The way Head Start works now, parents are actively engaged with much of the decision making at individual centers. Each center is required to have a parent committee that has power in advising the school on activities, policies and services, and the regulations determine how those must function.

Under the proposed rule, those committees would be optional, and the rules that govern how they operate would also be eliminated, which the administration said were designed to give programs more flexibility.

Are there any new rules being suggested? 

Yes, and they largely have to do with nutrition and physical activity.

Programs will be required to offer 30 minutes of physical activity, ideally outside, for every three and a half hours of classroom instruction. That would expand the existing that programs “recognize physical activity as important to learning and integrate intentional movement and physical activity into curricular activities and daily routines.”

require that programs generally fulfill a third to a half of children’s daily nutritional needs with meals at Head Start. Three- to 5-year-olds must get healthy meals and snacks that conform to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) guidelines, and meals should be culturally appropriate as well as developmentally appropriate — infants and toddlers are fed according to their individual needs and readiness.

Under the new proposal, they will also be required to offer nutrient-dense whole foods within the framework of the USDA Child and Adult Care Food Program meal standard, ensuring that “all the meals are aligned with the dietary guidelines,” Kennedy said.

What is the new addition around “healthy marriage”?

One of the less-talked-about additions the administration is proposing is providing educational material to children that “demonstrates healthy marriage as a positive good,” in concert with new strategies to engage parents in their kids’ learning, and particularly fathers, the rule says.

“This proposed change to current requirements reflects ACF’s commitment to supporting strong families as the cornerstone of a healthy society,” the administration said.

If the rule is finalized, do programs have to adhere to it? 

It’s unclear.

Adams emphasized that programs can continue to operate as they currently are if they wish to. In the areas where the administration is adding new requirements, however, such as nutrition and physical activity, programs would have to make changes.

“If a program likes its ratio, it can keep its ratio. If a program likes its group size, it can keep its group size. This does not require them to do anything different. As I said, flexibility is permission; it’s not a mandate,” Adams said.

But the actual regulations that would be part of the final rule — — don’t specify that most of this is optional.

“If they truly mean, for example, a program can decide to keep the ratios that exist in the regulations today, the regulation should say that. It should say programs have a choice,” Hamm said. “It doesn’t say that, and so that’s a problem for a lot of reasons.”

Head Start centers receive grants from the federal government to offer services — it’s unclear what assurance there is that the administration will offer grants to programs that choose to adhere to prior rules.

There’s already some evidence HHS could target programs it deems to be in misalignment with  the Trump administration. Earlier this year, the agency to Head Start programs that used words like “women” and “race” in their grant applications, what it perceived to be diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that have been a target of the administration.

Head Start programs in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin sued and a judge granted them a preliminary injunction, blocking the Trump administration from cutting funding while the case is litigated.

“When grants get negotiated or when there are grant competitions, and HHS is selecting a grantee, they have a lot of power in that,” Hamm said. “Oftentimes, a Head Start grant feels like they need to comply with what’s being asked of them.”

Why is the administration pursuing these changes? 

Since the start of the Trump administration, Head Start has .

Project 2025, the for President Donald Trump’s second term, advised eliminating the program, claiming it lacked positive outcomes and was rife with abuse. A leaked White House budget in early 2025 showed the administration was hoping to eliminate it altogether before massive backlash from Head Start parents and alumni persuaded the administration to change course.

But programs continued to face financial challenges. Funding was cut off at the start of 2025 as part of a government-wide freeze, leading some to close their doors. Then in April of last year, the administration closed five of the 10 regional offices that support Head Start programs.

Last summer, the administration released a proposed rule that would bar undocumented children from Head Start entirely. The proposal is on pause due to ongoing litigation.

Adams said the goal of the proposed rule is to provide flexibility in the program, not dismantle it.

“In broad strokes, what we are trying to accomplish is we built this rule around trusting local leaders to make the decisions that are best for their local communities,” he said.

If the changes were enacted across programs, the administration estimates a savings of $2.2 billion that would be reinvested in the program to open as many as 236,000 new Head Start spots. There is no national repository of waitlist data on Head Start, though programs are required to be filled and maintain an active waiting list.

“We’re trying to ensure that programs have the flexibility not just to meet their community needs, but to start clearing out some of their waitlists, ensuring more children are served,” Adams said.

How could these changes impact childcare staff? 

The administration is proposing a reduction in how much money programs can spend on administrative overhead, lowering it from 15 percent to 5 percent.

The justification, Adams said, is “so that more money is reaching children and families, and less is going to administrative overhead, like administrator salaries or administrative offices.”

But childcare providers have argued that the reduction will actually mean less money to operate Head Start — money that goes to things like buses and human resources, or to conduct background checks and fix the refrigerator when it breaks.

“Don’t believe that somehow that 15 percent makes our Head Start directors rich. It does not. Everyone I know in Head Start, including myself, has never become rich from being a Head Start employee,” said Lori Pittman, the co-founder of the Washington State Parent Ambassador Program and a former Head Start parent.

By the administration’s own analysis, the changes could lead to at centers across the country. Other workforces that : home visit staff, health and mental health personnel, child development specialists and bus monitoring staff.

Is there any new money for Head Start under the proposal? 

No. Funding for Head Start has remained flat for the past three years — about $12 billion — even though operating costs and inflation have risen.

How can I comment on the regulations? 

Comments in the federal registrar . The open comment period will close October 6.

was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of . .

I’ve been around long enough to know that when it comes to meeting the needs of children with disabilities, specifics matter. Head Start currently has a robust set of with numerous related to services for children with disabilities The require programs to follow federal law and promise added flexibility in how that’s done, but offer no guidance, stripping away detailed requirements.��

If the proposal is approved, programs would no longer be required to give developmental assessments to each child or accommodate all children so they can fully participate. 

It removes a specific directive that programs can’t turn children away because of a disability or chronic health condition. It removes the detailed guardrails on temporary suspensions and a prohibition on expulsion, which are important protections for children with disabilities. It also strikes requirements that programs support parents through the IEP process, which can be confusing and hard to navigate.

Head Start’s performance standards make sure children are given early support and opportunities that can shape their entire future. If those requirements disappear, children with disabilities lose the services, protections and pathways that make inclusion possible.

Since the 1960s, Head Start has provided early learning, health, nutrition, family support and developmental services to children whose families often face the greatest barriers to care. For children with disabilities, it has played an especially important role.

A decade before children with disabilities won the right to a free, appropriate public education, young children with disabilities were already being included in Head Start programs. Head Start helped establish a basic expectation that children with disabilities belong in early learning settings alongside their nondisabled peers.

Key to that progress are the standards built by Congress, advocates and the Office of Head Start, making room for children with all types of disabilities, including Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, and spina bifida, not just those with speech and language delays.

That’s important because children with disabilities are often turned away from other early childhood programs. Parents are told their child’s needs are too significant, that staff aren’t trained, that accommodations aren’t available or that another setting would be better. Families get the same message, again and again: Your child doesn’t belong here.

Head Start has been one of the few places where the answer is different: Yes, your child belongs, and yes, we know how to support them.

Federal law requires Head Start programs to include children with disabilities. The standards help make that requirement mean something in a child’s day. They catch delays in development early, oftentimes before it can affect learning. They shape whether a teacher knows who to call when a developmental concern comes up, whether a family gets help starting an evaluation, whether services continue while paperwork moves, and whether a child is supported in the classroom instead of sent home.

One of the central elements of a quality Head Start program is partnership. Partnerships with school districts, Medicaid agencies and parents. These partnerships work because the performance standards spell out the nature of the engagement. It’s not enough to tell a family that these services are available. Staff in all the partner agencies must understand fully their roles and responsibilities under multiple federal laws. When they don’t, which will happen if the performance standards are abandoned, children miss out. 

Without these standards, a child’s experience could depend far too much on where that child lives, what resources a local program has, and whether a parent knows how to navigate a complicated system. Children’s disabilities will be diagnosed later, which will put them at greater risk once they enter elementary school. Families with money and time may be able to hire specialists, pay for private evaluations or find another preschool. Families with fewer resources may have no alternative.

Children with disabilities are still eligible for special education services through the public education system, but without detailed standards they may no have access to the full array of Head Start’s comprehensive services, including physical and mental health care and parent engagement. That doesn’t give children more opportunity. It gives families less to count on.

Serving preschool children well, including those with disabilities, isn’t easy. It takes skilled teachers, family partnership, coordination with health providers and school districts, and a deep respect for each child’s development. Head Start staff do this work every day, often with too little pay and too few resources. Without the guidance of required performance standards, these essential supports won’t be maintained.

Children don’t get a second chance at early childhood. The first years of life are when communication, relationships, confidence and learning begin to take shape. When a developmental delay is identified early, a child can get the support they need to thrive. When a child with a disability learns alongside nondisabled peers, all children learn that difference is part of life and that every child belongs in the classroom. 

I’ve spent my career working with families, educators and advocates who know what happens when systems treat children with disabilities as someone else’s responsibility. Head Start’s standards help prevent that. They give programs clear responsibilities and families clear expectations. They help ensure that a child’s access doesn’t depend on how much a local program knows about disability or how hard a parent can fight.

The federal government should be strengthening that commitment.

Children with disabilities and children from families with low incomes already face too many barriers to early learning. Weakening Head Start’s standards would add another one.

This proposal should be judged by one question: Will it make it easier or harder for a child with a disability to be welcomed, supported and included? It’s very clear to me that this proposal eliminates and weakens the performance standards, that children with disabilities will be among the first to be harmed, and that harm could last a lifetime.

Head Start’s performance standards grew out of decades of experience with children and families. They must be maintained, enforced, and strengthened,  not dismantled.

The magic of Head Start is what happens once children and their families are enrolled, and for children with disabilities, that requires strong standards and a federal commitment to inclusion. That’s the Head Start worth protecting.

Updated August 18, 2026

A few years ago, Eric Gil was living at his uncle’s place in Waterbury, Connecticut, where he shared a bedroom with his brother and cousin. With eight people in the house, it was crowded. 

He was trying to get out, but rental prices in Waterbury — which currently average — were prohibitively expensive. Housing costs in New Haven, where he works as an assistant preschool teacher at Friends Center for Children, a nonprofit early care and education program, were even higher.

“I was looking everywhere,” Gil recalled. “It was out of my budget. It was like, for monthly rent, 40% of my monthly income. It was outrageous, basically.”

He and other early childhood educators are among the in the United States, often earning less than dog walkers. But short of a complete overhaul of the current early care and education system, that seems unlikely to change anytime soon. 

Thus, Gil remained in his uncle’s house, with a long daily commute to his teaching job and no clear way out. That is, until Friends Center offered him an opportunity to move into his own place just minutes away from his job — for free — through its , which covers the full cost of housing for select staff.

Friends Center, a early learning program with four locations across New Haven, currently employs 47 teachers, many of whom are in situations that resemble Gil’s. On their salaries, the area’s housing costs have left many of them in less-than-desirable living arrangements. 

It’s an issue that Friends Center has been trying to solve for years. Back in 2019, the organization wanted to get to the root of the problem and raise salaries, said CEO Allyx Schiavone. But after months of trying to figure out how to budget for salary increases, Schiavone realized they couldn’t cover them without more public funding or raising tuition for families. 

So they tried to do the next best thing and reduce what was overwhelmingly the biggest expense for employees. 

“At that moment,” Schiavone said, “we decided, as an organization, we were going to tackle that: We were going to figure out how to give teachers free housing.”

The teacher housing initiative formally kicked off in 2020, when the first teacher moved into a three-family home. Today, 10 teachers, including Gil, live in free housing provided by Friends Center, with two more slated to move in this fall. The nonprofit has set a goal of housing 30% of its growing teaching staff by 2028, which Schiavone said it is on track to do; the center expects to double its housing inventory over the next three years. 

As the teacher housing initiative is scaling up in New Haven, the work is catching on elsewhere too. Early childhood educators in Missouri, Michigan and Georgia are also getting free housing now, with inspiration and support from leaders at Friends Center. 

When the initiative began, the first two properties — a three-family home and a single-family home — were donated to Friends Center, creating four housing units for staff members. In addition to donated properties, Friends Center also has a partnership with Yale School of Architecture, in which graduate students design and construct about one home per year for an early childhood educator. All the properties involved in the initiative are owned by Friends Center, making the organization both the landlord and employer of all teacher residents.

The benefit of free housing can be a game-changer for teachers. In Connecticut, early childhood educators earn, on average, about $31,000 per year, according to the most recent from the Early Childhood Workforce Index, and the median in the state is about $24,000 per year, according to Zillow.

Friends Center pays its staff well above the state average, Schiavone said, but it’s still “not a livable wage.” 

When the organization decided to provide free housing to its teachers, it intentionally started with those who needed it most — typically the lowest-income earners with dependents. 

The first tenant, housed in 2020, was a single mom. The next year, another single mother, Paris Pierce, moved into a single-family home with her young children. Both homes were purchased by donors for Friends Center.��

Pierce said she loves the charms that come with her old house, like the stained-glass windows. She loves all the natural light that floods in, too, and the fact that her kids — now ages 4, 8 and 14 — have more room than before.

Gil moved into Friends Center housing about two years ago. He lives in a home that was built by students through the partnership with Yale University. 

The Yale houses are worth about $750,000, and Friends Center is getting them for about $300,000. These homes are all constructed on one large property that was donated to the housing initiative. Today, five Friends Center teachers live as neighbors in that area, which is known as “the Village” and is about a five-minute walk from the program where most of them work.

Gil lives with one of his teaching colleagues. They share a kitchen, but otherwise have separate spaces throughout the house, which Gil said is very spacious with “huge, beautiful” windows — his favorite part of his new residence. The two colleagues have since become friends, Gil said; they often read, watch movies, play video games and work out together. 

Every teacher who receives free housing meets monthly with a financial coach to help them set and reach goals. How much do they want to be saving each month? How can they improve their credit scores? 

Pierce said her goal is to save money, and already she’s been able to put her two older children in extracurricular activities — dance for her daughter and soccer for her son — that she wasn’t able to afford before. Pierce recently enrolled in a program to earn her bachelor’s degree so she can become a lead teacher. 

The free housing, Pierce said, has made her a better mother and a better teacher. 

“I can show up being my best self, not worrying about making ends meet. I can pursue other things,” she said. “Children pick up on everything, [so] me being able to show up and be my best self is a great feeling.”

It didn’t take long for word of the housing initiative to travel far. Many early care and education programs across the country heard about Friends Center’s approach and wanted to learn more. Since 2020, more than 1,000 visitors have traveled to New Haven to see it for themselves, and some have taken their observations back home and begun to act. 

Leaders at Urban Sprouts, a nonprofit early learning program in St. Louis, visited Friends Center in August 2025. They thought it was a clever approach to the teacher shortage in the field, even if it wasn’t directly remedying the issue of teachers being “woefully underpaid,” said Joey Saunders, chief of strategy and advancement at Urban Sprouts. 

Urban Sprouts, which serves about 130 children from birth to age 5 at a single location, launched a pilot program this year that would provide free housing to staff in a model that closely aligns with Friends Center’s. Program leaders identified two teachers for the first two houses in its pilot. 

Zarina Militello, an infant-toddler teacher at Urban Sprouts, moved into a two-bedroom house in April. Urban Sprouts, with the help of some partner organizations, had furnished every room in the space except her bedroom. “Everything down to kitchen utensils was provided,” she said. “It was very, very nice.”

Militello had been living with her parents and younger brothers until the move earlier this year. The average cost of a studio apartment in University City, the neighborhood in St. Louis where the center is located, is between $1,400 and $1,600 per month, Saunders said. Militello preferred to save money by living with her parents over spending most of her paycheck on rent, especially with student loans hanging over her. But she was commuting 45 minutes each way, often arriving to work late, and spending way too much of her income on gas, she said. 

Now, living in the employer housing, she can walk to work in about 5 minutes — and is showing up on time every day. 

Jenyne Woodruff, a longtime pre-K teacher at Urban Sprouts, learned in June that the center had purchased a three-bedroom house for her, her daughter and her granddaughter. Seeing the house for the first time, she was very emotional. When she moved in earlier this summer, it became the first time in her entire life that she’s had her own bedroom. Even in the rental property she just left, which she shared with her daughter and granddaughter, Woodruff didn’t have a room with a door — and for that she was paying about $1,700 per month. 

“It is a literal dream come true,” she said of the new house. “It has been rough. I’ve been on my own since I was 19 years old. It’s been a struggle. When I walked in [to my new house], I just felt like it was my home. I am very grateful.”

In Battle Creek, Michigan, a group of seven community partners has come together to form a version of Friends Center’s housing initiative — which is now named First Home, First Teacher — that aims to provide rent-free housing as a salaried benefit to 30% of the area’s childcare workforce over the next 20 years.

Battle Creek, with a population of 55,000, lacks a large center-based early care and education provider like Friends Center, said Kathy Szenda Wilson, co-executive director of Pulse, an initiative of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research focused on improving early childhood development in Michigan. (Pulse is one of the groups that helped design and launch the initiative in Battle Creek.) Instead, Battle Creek has lots of small programs. By her count, there are about 550 employees across 34 center-based programs in the city.��

The model builds on an earlier to provide short-term rental assistance to childcare workers during and after the pandemic. “From that, at least we know the ground is tilled,” said Szenda Wilson. 

After traveling to Connecticut and seeing what Friends Center was doing, a team of early childhood advocates from Battle Creek wondered what it would take for their community to offer something more transformational than rental assistance. 

The First Home, First Teacher initiative in Battle Creek is still young. This summer, the partner organizations are working to establish a trust and a governing board to oversee the initiative. But they’re not letting the process hold up progress.��

On June 8, the partners had a “furnishing day” with the two inaugural teacher residents of First Home, First Teacher in Battle Creek — two single moms from two different centers, living with their kids in a two-unit duplex.��

The pilot at Urban Sprouts, the initiative in Battle Creek, and an early childhood program in Georgia that started a year-and-a-half ago and has so far housed two teachers are all working closely with Friends Center. Schiavone, at Friends Center, is glad to see communities building on the model she established in Connecticut. 

“What we’re doing here in New Haven is version 1.0,” she said. 

To truly scale, she added, the work needs to be publicly funded, and the model needs to move away from having the childcare program as the property owner.

“We don’t think, at the scale version, that is the best way to move forward,” she said. “Childcare providers don’t want to be owners and landlords.”

That’s why she’s especially interested to see what comes of the work in Battle Creek. 

Schiavone and the other program leaders are clear, though, that free teacher housing is not a solution to the systemic problems that face early childhood educators. 

“Early childhood education is only as strong as the people who provide it,” Schiavone said. “We’re paying women to be in poverty. It is completely unacceptable.”

Saunders, at Urban Sprouts in St. Louis, emphasized that the housing initiative there is in pilot stage and will hopefully scale, but that it’s not meant to distract from the larger issues in the field. “We’ll continue to ring the bell that this is a real crisis across our nation,” he said. 

“If we want high-quality early care and education, then we need educators to be stable and feel secure and be their best selves,” Schiavone said. “We believe you can’t wait for public funding. If you wait, ideas will die. You need to move forward.”

Clarification: Friends Center is working in partnership with the Yale School of Architecture’s graduate students to design and construct homes for early childhood educators.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the number of children the first tenant had. The story has also been updated to reflect a recent name change to Friend Center’s housing initiative. It’s now called First Home, First Teacher.��

A.J. Johnson’s oldest son was born in 2019, the year residents of his home state of Washington could receive benefits from its newly passed paid family leave program. Johnson, a full-time firefighter, had to save up accrued sick leave to take time off around his son’s birth. He took six weeks off to bond with his son and said he was grateful for the time, though he felt he had to fend off his “grizzly, old, mustachioed” co-workers who bragged about taking just two hours to be in the hospital for their children’s births before returning to work. 

But it was very difficult on him and his wife. “It was certainly shorter than I wanted,” he said. His wife, a middle school counselor, was able to take a lengthy leave of absence from work and then had the summer off. But his son still wasn’t even sleeping through the night when Johnson had to return to work. “It was really hard,” he recalled. He worked 24-hour shifts and was anxious about leaving his wife and newborn at home alone for such long periods of time.��

Things were completely different when his second son was born in late 2021 and Washington’s paid family leave program was fully established. He was able to take about five months of paid leave total, including 12 weeks through the paid family leave program and an additional eight weeks of sick leave. He also added accrued vacation time on top to ensure he received his full pay beyond the state’s benefit cap and kept his benefits. “It was like nothing changed financially for us, but we got to have that almost six months of time together,” he said. “Having the ability to be there for my 3-year-old and my wife, but also being able to bond with my newborn, was the most amazing [few months] of my life.” He felt much more bonded to his younger son than his first after spending uninterrupted time together instead of “rushing off to go back to work and being gone for an entire day,” he said. “I was able to more quickly become a more confident parent.”

It was also particularly useful at a time when children still couldn’t get COVID-19 vaccinations. Johnson and his wife were able to figure out how to entertain and protect their children together. It allowed them to “just spend time together and navigate what it’s like to be a family of four, not having to worry about not going to work or one of us not being there when we’re trying to put a baby to sleep or bathe the kids,” he said.

By the time he took time off for his second son, the workplace culture around him had changed, too — which he chalks up to his state’s implementation of paid family leave. The men he works with now almost uniformly take the full amount of paternity leave available to them. They think, he said, “I have this opportunity to spend an extended period away from work and with my family and I’m going to take it.”

Fourteen states and Washington, D.C., now have paid family leave. In most of those programs, fathers are now taking nearly equal shares of bonding leave to spend time away from work with their new children as mothers, according to a from Paid Leave For All, an advocacy organization. In two states, Colorado and Washington, men are actually taking a greater share of bonding leaves. And in states where men aren’t yet taking equal shares of bonding leave, they increased their share last year compared to the year before. 

“Dads really want to be able to take leave to bond with their children, and when presented with the opportunity through this public investment, dads are showing up, stepping up and taking advantage of this opportunity,” said Molly Weston Williamson, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and author of the Paid Leave for All report.

The findings track a trend in the rest of the country in which more and more men have been taking paid leave to bond with their new children in recent years. But in the that don’t yet have paid family leave programs, fathers still aren’t on par with mothers, according to by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. As of 2018, only of Americans worked at a job that offers paid paternity leave to all workers. Indeed, it is in the states with paid family leave where gender parity in bonding leave has advanced the most. “State paid leave programs are providing the opportunity for dads to do the thing they have wanted to do all along, but don’t necessarily have the ability to do elsewhere,” Williamson said.��

Men in states with paid family leave programs are also much less likely to forgo taking leave at all. Before any of the programs started up, three-quarters of fathers took no leave to spend time with their newborns, compared to less than 18% of mothers, according to the CEPR report. “There’s been a total explosion in the number of claims from men,” Williamson said. “Virtually all of the growth in bonding leave claims has come from this massive, massive increase in claims from men.”

That trend looks set to continue, Williamson said. Comparing numbers from this year to last, the share of dads just keeps growing. “That is really suggesting this is a lasting trend — we’re not seeing a blip,” she said. 

The Paid Leave for All report could only examine full data for programs that have been in operation for a year or more, which include nine states and Washington, D.C. But preliminary data from those that launched in 2026 is also promising, according to Paid Leave For All’s report. In Delaware, fathers took 46% of bonding leaves, compared to 54% for mothers, and in Maine it was 44% for fathers and 56% for mothers. The gap was wider in Minnesota — 36% of bonding leaves for fathers compared to 64% for mothers — but it was still off to a better start than California, the first state with a paid family leave program, where men took just 15% of bonding leaves in 2004, the program’s first year. 

Things have also changed greatly in California and many of the other early states to get to such equal numbers. California and New Jersey, for example, have increased how much money employees can receive while on paid family leave and added job protection so they can return to their positions when leave is over, Williamson said. That’s helped fathers take more advantage of the programs: In New Jersey, men accounted for 11% of bonding leave claims in the program’s first year, and 33% last year, according to the Paid Leave For All report. Last year, California fathers accounted for 50% of bonding leaves.

Research has revealed that there are a multitude of benefits when fathers take paternity leave. It can . The confidence fathers gain from caring for and bonding with their newborns has been found to when their children are older and help them with their children. Paternity leave also how heterosexual couples share childcare and paid work, with fathers more likely to at home. Research shows the benefit can and can . When fathers take leave, it benefits mothers too: it , improves their and increases . 

“Dads taking leave is good for everybody,” Williamson said. 

James Liu, who works for a small technology company in San Francisco, took his 12 weeks of leave in two batches a year ago when his daughter was born. For him, living in a state that has had a paid family leave program for over 20 years, the culture of men taking leave was already solidified. “Most families I know, both parents took leave,” he said. “I almost took it for granted: ‘Oh yeah, if we have a child, I’ll take leave.’” 

Liu’s employer topped off California’s program, giving him a bit more time than the state’s mandated eight weeks and covering his full pay while he was out. The first month he took off was mostly spent surviving the chaos of the early infant days, but he took the rest of his time when his daughter was 5 months old and his wife went back to work, and it was far more meaningful. “It really helped me grow in confidence as a dad,” he said. “Having that one-on-one time, I really felt like I’m a primary parent, too.”

Had he not been able to get paid while on leave, Liu thinks he would still have taken time off, but he said it would definitely have been for a shorter amount of time — possibly only for a week or two at the start of his daughter’s life. He’s grateful not just for the time with his daughter, but for the peace of mind bonding leave brought him. He was glad to have her cared for at home for so long before she started going to a childcare program and relieved that he didn’t have to worry about job security while he and his wife were on leave.

Liu and his wife started looking at childcare options when their daughter was just a few months old and realized that many Americans don’t get paid family leave and send their children to childcare just weeks after birth. “We felt really, really grateful for the time,” he said, while “almost mourning that this is not the default for many folks.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of states that don’t have paid family leave programs. There are 36 states that don’t have paid family leave programs.

Screen time limits for Los Angeles Unified School District’s youngest students begin in August.

“My hope and expectation is that most families will see a dramatic reduction in screen time during the school day, but also in the evenings, as mandated by school,” said Nick Melvoin, who represents the Westside’s Board District 4.

While LAUSD was the , the policy, along with , is part of a nationwide trend toward limiting young people’s exposure to tech during the school day.

Many parents have embraced — and advocated for— less technology in the classroom, but questions remain about how LAUSD will enforce the screen time limits and the potential for unintended consequences for students who have less access to devices outside of school.

What part of the screen time limits start in August?

The  eliminates digital device usage for students in early education (preschool), transitional kindergarten (TK), kindergarten and first grade.

There are several exceptions, including:

Students will not be automatically issued devices to take home. However, there is still a process for families to request one.

The policy also requires the district to block all students from accessing YouTube, social media and streaming platforms without teacher approval.

The type of work students bring home may change, too. The policy encourages educators to provide off-screen assignments.

“Homework should prioritize reading, writing, problem-solving, hands-on activities, observation, and other learning experiences that can be completed without the use of a device,” .

Andrés Chait, the district’s superintendent, said at a July 21 news conference that implementing the new policy will take time.

“On Aug. 12, you may not necessarily see in the immediate all of the changes that the policy calls for, but they will be implemented methodically and transparently,” Chait said.

Where did the screen time policy come from?

A group of Los Angeles parents organized a group called  in 2025 and started , collecting petition signatures and .

Melvoin brought forward the resolution that ultimately led to the new policy .

“We had not recalibrated or reset our relationship with technology post-COVID,” said Melvoin, at the time. “Six years ago, we sent every kid in L.A. home with a device, which was a lifeline. … But when they came back, I’m still seeing kids as young as preschool on devices all day.”

The board adopted the policy  after staff conducted research and outreach to parents, educators and community members.

How much does it cost to limit screen time?

District staff  up to $4 million in one-time funds to purchase carts to store laptops in elementary school classrooms and an annual $1 million to pay for software to track screen time and block content.

The district has yet to spend this money, according to a statement from a Los Angeles Unified spokesperson.

“Conversations with schools will take place in the early part of the upcoming school year to assess needs on a school-by-school basis,” the statement read.

Was there any pushback to the new policy?

The board voted unanimously to adopt the screen time policy with the exception of Board President Scott Schmerelson, who recused himself from the vote.

However, there was some discussion about whether the limitations would have unintended consequences for teachers and students.

Board Vice President Rocío Rivas cautioned that the minute limits may discourage teachers from assigning multimedia projects, and adds the burden of monitoring student technology use.

“Schools may end up focusing on counting minutes, documenting usage, auditing classrooms instead of evaluating learning outcomes,” Rivas said.

LAUSD staff’s  noted a “risk of slowing access to technology and its advancement for students to compete with the world.”

During public comment in June, Mireya Garcia, a mother and grandmother, told the board that her family shares a single computer at home.

“I don’t want them to lose access to tools that can help them read, to learn and to be successful,” Garcia said.

How are teachers preparing for the changes?

LAUSD adopted the screen time policy when most teachers and students were off-campus for the summer.

A Los Angeles Unified spokesperson wrote in a statement that training has started with “dedicated sessions” for principals and administrators and that more resources will be available to educators before Aug.12 and throughout the school year.

“This approach allows us to be respectful of educators’ time while ensuring schools are prepared and supported for a successful rollout,” the spokesperson wrote.

The first opportunity for most teachers to return to their classroom is on Monday, Aug. 10, two days before school starts.

Stephanie Levinson, who’s taught at San Fernando Elementary for 28 years, said she has not received any additional guidance from the district since the policy was passed this summer.

This year, she’ll teach a combined first- and second-grade class. Under the new policy, first graders do not have access to digital devices and second graders can use them for up to 20 minutes per day this year.

“It’s stressful because we don’t know,” Levinson said. “It’s hard to plan a school day when we’re not sure what’s gonna be mandated, how things are gonna work.”

Levinson said that, in the past, she’d assign students to use interactive learning programs like ABCmouse while she worked with their peers in small groups. She also fundraised to bring laptops and tablets to her classroom, where most students come from low-income families, before the devices were widespread in the district.

“If a kid hasn’t learned how to even use a computer or type, how are they going to…not be disadvantaged against kids that have computers?” Levinson said.

How can families get access to a digital device?

Parents and guardians can request a take-home device  or through the district’s .

The Los Angeles Public Library has a for adults.

What’s next for screen time in LAUSD?

The policy requires the board to review the screen time rules at least once a year during a public meeting.

“One of the reasons we crafted this policy is because we didn’t see a policy that we could just adopt nationally,” Melvoin said. “But that also means that it’ll be iterative and that we’re working out the kinks.”

The district has also created an ad hoc committee to provide recommendations on how the district is using AI.

• District- and state-mandated assessments.��
• Students enrolled in the LAUSD Virtual Academy program.��
• To help students with disabilities learn, as mandated by their Individualized Education Program (IEP) or 504 Plan.��

This was originally published by .

The turning point came several years ago for Reed, who lives in Spokane, Washington, when she was offered transitional housing in an apartment building that happened to be co-located with a Head Start program. 

Reed, a single mom, enrolled her youngest child, an infant daughter named Evie, in Head Start.

The federal antipoverty program is best known for providing high-quality early care and education to young children from low-income families, but as Reed soon learned, what truly sets it apart is the slew of wraparound services that meet families where they are and help them build toward something better. 

Head Start provided Reed with essential goods like diapers, formula, clothing and food. Staff helped her navigate the public school system with her older son, who has autism, even though he wasn’t in the program. Head Start provided her daughter with free hearing and vision screenings and dental care. It empowered her to “find her voice” by giving her a leadership position with the policy council, a majority-parent group involved in each Head Start program’s decision-making, a step which she said has made her a “better mom and … better community member.” 

“I felt like they loved my children like they were their own and cared about all of our well-beings,” said Reed, whose daughter is moving on to kindergarten later this month. “They saw us as a whole and tried to help wherever they could. And if they couldn’t, they would sit down and research what would help.”

Some of the very services that proved to be transformational for Reed and her family, however, may now be at risk. 

In a proposed rule change on Aug. 6, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. invoked the name of his uncle, Sargent Shriver, who led Head Start’s creation in 1965, saying his department was “removing unnecessary bureaucracy” that would return the program to its roots. Others say the changes will weaken or eliminate most of the standards that have long positioned Head Start as the “gold standard” for early care and education licensing and quality in this country. “Nothing else compares,” said Shantel Meek, founder and executive director of the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University.

The Trump administration is proposing that the of Head Start Program Performance Standards be reduced to about a dozen pages, eliminating requirements for standards such as low adult-to-child ratios; services such as medical, dental and developmental screenings and individualized services for children with disabilities; and requiring programs to conduct all education in the English language. The , which will officially be published to the Federal Register tomorrow, outlines the drastic reduction in standards. If passed, these changes would allow Head Start programs to adhere only to state and local childcare licensing requirements, which typically fall of the quality and safety standards long embraced by Head Start.

“It basically takes the country from the ceiling to the floor,” said Meek. “The kids that Head Start serves will bear the brunt of the impact, but it will go beyond. States and the field in general see Head Start as a north star we’re trying to build to, and they’re trying to tear that down and gut the heart of the program.”

In addition to removing many Head Start standards, this proposed rule would also change the cap on administrative overhead from 15% to 5% of a program’s total costs. Trump officials believe this, plus other cost-saving measures such as having fewer teachers on staff, serving more children in each classroom and spending less money on services such as home visiting and mental health supports, will reinvest up to $2.2 billion in the program, allowing Head Start to “preserve or expand” services to an additional 236,000 children nationwide. Critics, however, believe that reducing the quality of care for the sake of adding slots is a dangerous game to be playing — especially when quality has been a hallmark of Head Start throughout its history. 

“It feels like the Trump administration is saying, ‘Let’s see who can do this for the cheapest.’ That’s not what I think anyone wants — or should want,” said Joel Ryan, executive director of the Washington State Association of Head Start and the Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program. “I see this rule as incredibly destructive. I see it as another attempt to dismantle the Head Start program.”

Ryan’s colleague Lori Pittman, chief strategist at the WSA and a former Head Start parent, said the 5% cap would be a “really, really scary thing.”

“To take away the foundation and the structures that build this house called Head Start,” Pittman added, “will only destroy it, and we’re not going to let that happen.”

The publication of the full proposal tomorrow will kick off a 60-day period of public comments, during which administration officials will receive and review feedback. The federal changes could also face legal challenges, many stakeholders told �鶹��Ʒ.

Katie Hamm, former deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development under President Joe Biden, said that the proposal would strip away the elements of Head Start that make it exceptional. 

“What sets Head Start apart from other programs are its quality standards, comprehensive services, parental involvement in shaping the program, and a commitment to welcoming all children,” Hamm said. “All of those things are undermined in the revision.”

Trump administration officials see it differently. The proposed rule is about cutting red tape and “trusting local leaders to make the decisions that are best for their local communities,” said Alex Adams, who leads the Administration for Children and Families at HHS, during a call with reporters, adding that “one-size-fits-all mandates from Washington cannot fully account for the realities facing the 1,600 grantees.” 

Later in the call, Adams referred to the proposed rule as a “right-sizing” of Head Start and emphasized that the flexibility these changes are meant to provide is “permission, not a mandate.”

Yet leaders on the ground fear that if it’s not required, it won’t hold up in most programs. 

“How quickly this affects families will vary by program, and that’s the problem,” said Hamm. “If the floor is gone, it comes down to whether each local decision-maker chooses to hold the line or start cutting corners. That’s happening against flat funding and rising costs, with pressure to serve more children. When a standard isn’t on paper, it becomes optional.” 

Head Start, a federally funded early childhood development program that turned 60 last year, has come under fire repeatedly since the start of the second Trump administration a year-and-a-half-ago. 

The program serving nearly has long been a target of the right, most recently with the conservative playbook calling for its total elimination and a leaked appearing to cut funding for the program altogether. Though that ultimately didn’t pass, the administration turned to what Hamm called “the death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach,” repeatedly delaying funding and disrupting grants, closing roughly half of the program’s regional offices and eliminating a number of federal positions that supported Head Start.

The administration then unsuccessfully attempted to ban practices involving diversity, equity and inclusion and exclude scores of immigrant kids from the program, meaning preschoolers without legal status — and even some with— . And it the federal policy protecting childcare programs — and other so-called sensitive locations — from immigration enforcement. Meanwhile, last year’s government shutdown also locked thousands of the nation’s most vulnerable kids out of Head Start programming. And more recently, the administration a Biden-era rule requiring higher wages and better benefits for Head Start teachers.

This week’s proposal to overhaul Head Start’s regulatory standards will only further contribute to the widespread uncertainty and confusion, various stakeholders told �鶹��Ʒ. And if the changes are confirmed, they will have enduring consequences for children, families and early educators. 

To middle and upper class Americans, the value of some of Head Start’s signature services may seem overstated, noted Nancy Baker, Head Start director for the Butler County Educational Service Center in southwest Ohio, which oversees 631 children in Early Head Start and Head Start across 16 sites in two counties. 

But the reality is that for many children in Head Start, the classroom setting may be their only opportunity for services such as oral care or a vision screening. 

“These families are in poverty,” Baker said. “They may not have transportation … If you are working in a low-paying job that may not offer sick leave, when the doctor’s visit comes due and you have to work that day, a parent will have to choose between, ‘Do I go to work, or do I take my child to the dentist and risk being fired?’” 

“Every day missed is money out of your pocket,” Baker added. “It becomes kind of a vicious cycle.”

Head Start’s comprehensive services are provided, in part, out of a recognition that families who are eligible for the program face resource constraints and other barriers that may prevent them from meeting their children’s basic needs. The program aims to address those needs so families can pursue stability and children can be free to learn, develop and thrive. 

Plus, Baker added, physical impairments in a young child can be mistaken for behavioral issues. A child with imperfect vision may be perceived as inattentive and unable to focus. With a pair of glasses, their entire learning experience — and classroom identity — can change. Head Start also tests children for lead, Baker added. They’ve discovered children in Butler County with high lead levels, which “can mimic ADHD-type behaviors,” she said, adding that “continuous lead exposure can lead to some pretty serious cognitive delays.”

“It’s a holistic program,” Baker said of Head Start. “It’s much, much more than childcare. It’s even much more than preschool. That’s where the standards start coming into play.”

Baker is proud of the services her community’s Head Start programs provide to children and families, from nutrition to family engagement to mental health consultations. And she is “disheartened” by this new attempt to “whittle down” Head Start. 

“Some things they’re looking to reduce or eliminate are not massive, budget-saving things,” Baker said. “They’re just good things to do for kids, particularly for children experiencing poverty.”

Most of the standards the administration wants to eliminate, she added, are “good, proven services that don’t break the bank. We’re not tied up in bureaucracy and red tape. These are health screenings. Why would you want to get rid of that?”

Meek feels similarly about the “cutting red tape” argument from the administration. 

“Brushing kids’ teeth and providing inclusive services for kids with disabilities and … using ratios that are manageable so adults can engage in the learning process with kids — none of that is red tape,” she said. “Those are all essential things to make sure kids are safe, healthy, developing and learning.”

Some parents have echoed these concerns. Reed, the mom in Spokane, worries about the elimination of Head Start’s low ratios, which allow adults to work with fewer children at a time, thereby giving each child more care and attention. 

If this proposal is confirmed later this year and Head Start programs do begin to align only with state and local childcare licensing requirements, many programs could see dramatic increases in ratios and group sizes. 

For example, Early Head Start, an extension of Head Start that serves infants and toddlers, allows one adult to care for up to four 2-year-olds at a given time. Only three states meet that same benchmark for 2-year-olds, according to an from the Children’s Equity Project. By contrast, in Mississippi, one adult is permitted to care for up to 12 2-year-olds, and in Texas and Florida, one adult can care for up to 11 toddlers. If a Head Start teacher begins caring for two or even three times as many children as before, they not only risk missing warning signs in some children — such as a behavioral issue or a physical need going unmet — but they are also much more likely to burn out and leave the position.

Meek, at the Children’s Equity Project, said this is one of the standards that she feels most strongly about. Another, she said, is the impact on dual language learners. 

Currently, Head Start standards include several provisions specific to children who are learning English alongside the language that is spoken at home. For example, if a majority of children in a program speak a primary language other than English, at least one staff member who regularly interacts with those children must also speak that language. 

That standard has been in place since 1975, when the original regulatory standards for Head Start were published, the Children’s Equity Project found. 

“It’s not something new and crazy and ideological that was added,” Meek said. “It’s been there since the beginning.”

The changes for dual language learners — including the requirement that all programs educate children only in English — would affect an estimated of children in Head Start.

Adams at ACF told reporters in the press briefing that he hoped the 60-day public comment period would lead to “robust engagement and thoughtful engagement with the community so we can get this rule right in broad strokes.” 

But at least some families and providers involved in Head Start worry that the major decisions around this rule change have already been made. 

“This is like a slow-moving disaster,” said Ryan, “a slow erosion as dollars fade away, people fade away and ultimately quality fades away. And that’s the real danger in this.”

Roughly 2,000 families received offers for a spot in the inaugural year of 2-K, New York City’s new free childcare program for 2-year-olds, officials announced Tuesday.

Around 5,700 families applied for the , which were restricted to priority neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.

“Today represents a monumental step on the path to universal childcare here in New York City,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at a press conference Tuesday morning in the Bronx. Mamdani made a key campaign pledge.

“We are writing a better chapter for … the generations of New Yorkers many years from now who will start families here in our city and who will not need to worry about leaving their job or moving out of the neighborhood they love to make it all work,” he said.

The release of the offers comes after city officials spent months spreading the word about the new program with events such as a “ in Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park and a judged by Cardi B and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

The initial interest in 2-K comes as welcome news for Mamdani after his administration’s efforts to boost publicity for the city’s 3-K and prekindergarten programs Those programs, while wildly popular and oversubscribed in some neighborhoods, have in other parts of the city.

Officials didn’t share any details about how the initial round of applications and offers were distributed between the priority neighborhoods: Washington Heights and Inwood in Manhattan, Canarsie and Brownsville in Brooklyn, Ozone Park and the Rockaways in Queens, and Fordham, Belmont, Riverdale and other nearby neighborhoods in the Bronx.

Emmy Liss, the executive director of the mayor’s Office for Childcare and Early Childhood Education, said the “majority” of the children who received offers live in the priority districts. Officials prioritized applicants who have siblings at the program they applied to, or were already attending that program, and those who live in the same district, Liss said.

More than 80% of applicants got into one of their top three choices, and more than half got into their first choice, officials said. Families that applied and didn’t get an offer will automatically be added to waitlists.

In a press release Tuesday morning, officials said that the application results from this year would help guide the expansion of the program next year. Mamdani has pledged that the program will grow to 12,000 seats next year and expand citywide by the end of his first term, though Gov. Kathy Hochul has only committed funding for the first two years. A found that it will likely cost around $9 billion to provide free universal childcare for all children under age 5, about $5 billion more than the city is currently spending,

Officials haven’t yet shared where the additional 10,000 2-K seats for next year will be located, except that they will likely add seats in the priority neighborhoods and some of the new seats will be in Staten Island, the only borough not a part of this year’s 2-K rollout.v

Seats are split between center and . Unlike 3-K and pre-K, which mostly follow the K-12 school calendar, .

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California schools now have two screening instruments that use playful games and stories to test 4-year-olds’ language skills without making them cry.

The California Department of Education this spring approved two language screeners for use in transitional kindergarten to replace the English Language Proficiency Assessment for California (ELPAC), which lawmakers barred schools from administering to TK students two years ago.

All K-12 students who speak languages other than English at home are required to take the ELPAC within 30 days of enrollment to determine their English proficiency. But teachers and advocates reported some TK students fluent in English were identified as English learners simply because they were too young to be tested. Some teachers said the experience caused some 4-year-olds to down on their desks or simply refuse to answer questions. 

The ELPAC measures reading and writing skills that most 4-year-olds have not yet developed, advocates and researchers said. Researchers said screening instruments for this age group should instead measure speaking and understanding and use games, stories and conversation designed for young children.

A by New America and the American Institutes for Research found that 22 states and Washington, D.C. screen students to identify English learners before kindergarten. The two screeners selected for use in California are among the most common, with each used in nine other states. 

Alesha Moreno-Ramirez, director of the state education department’s Multilingual Support Division, said the two approved screening tests are developmentally appropriate for 4-year-olds, can test in more than one language and can be administered across the state. 

The screeners “provide an educator insights so that perhaps they’ll use a different kind of scaffolding, or perhaps they’ll bring in additional resources, or maybe they’ll bring in literature in different languages and introduce them into their TK classroom,” said Moreno-Ramirez.

One of the screeners, Early Childhood, uses a story board and pieces, including characters and objects, to assess a child’s understanding and speaking through storytelling. In a demonstration video, an examiner reads a story little by little and asks the student questions.

“Sarah’s mother calls the children to come to the picnic table. So what do you think Jack and Sarah are going to do?” she asks.

“They’re going to eat at the picnic table,” answers the child.

The other screener, , uses colorful pictures to assess proficiency. In one of its four sections, the examiner shows the student pictures of eyes and ears and asks them to point to their own eye or ear. In another section, labeled “Art Show,” the examiner shows the student a drawing of children looking at paintings of a dog and cat and asks them to describe what is happening. Students are also asked to repeat phrases as well as listen to a story and retell it as the examiner points to the pictures.

“I feel very pleased that we’re no longer using an assessment that’s developmentally inappropriate for younger children,” said Carolyne Crolotte, director of policy at Early Edge California, a nonprofit that advocated to exempt TK students from taking the ELPAC.

Texas has used preLAS to measure English language proficiency for pre-K and kindergarten students since 2019. Henry Castellanos, principal of Delco Elementary School in Austin, said he administered it many times as a bilingual reading interventionist.

“I definitely feel like it was a good read and measure on where students were,” Castellanos said. “All the components are very age appropriate.”

Castellanos spent his elementary school years in the early 2000s in West Covina. He spoke Spanish at home with his parents, but said he gradually lost much of the language as he became proficient in English and could not keep up with peers or cousins when he would visit Mexico.

At the time, California had severely restricted bilingual education, while Texas its bilingual programs.

“Knowing what I know now, I’m like, dang, I missed out on so many opportunities, because it was literally all English the whole time,” he said.

Both California screening exams can also be used to measure Spanish language skills, which advocates said is important for children who speak Spanish at home, so teachers can understand their vocabulary and expression in their home language. However, they cannot be used in other languages.

The two screeners will be piloted this school year in some California school districts, and then rolled out to all school districts in 2027-28. Moreno-Ramirez said the field testing is not intended to check whether the test is reliable or useful, but rather to inform guidance, training and access.

“It will help us identify any sticking points related to rollout,” said Moreno-Ramirez.

Under state law, the new screeners cannot be used to officially identify transitional kindergarten students as English learners, which means schools will not be able to get federal funding for those children until they enter kindergarten. To make up for the state funding that schools would have received for English learners through the Local Control Funding Formula, the Legislature made a temporary fix to allow schools to use the percentage of English learners in kindergarten to approximate the percentage of English learners in transitional kindergarten and receive similar funding, but only until 2027. In order to receive funding for these students after 2027, the Legislature would have to pass another law.

In addition, schools are not required by law to provide students who are not officially identified as English learners with language services. Nor are they required to report their academic or language progress on the California School Dashboard.

“We’re hoping educators feel compelled to support their students based on their understanding of their multilingual experience,” Moreno-Ramirez said. “We want to make sure that we’re not just thinking about providing supports and services for those students for whom it’s required by federal law, but also thinking about the opportunity for kids in the earliest years that we recognize their linguistic assets.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s administration is planning a dramatic overhaul of  that would gut its quality standards, upending the hallmarks of the early education program for impoverished children, two people familiar with the deliberations said.

Head Start, established in the 1960s to help fight poverty, has long been considered by experts to be a gold standard early learning program. Its regulations, which stretch more than 100 pages, outline requirements on everything from child-to-teacher ratios and child health screenings to family engagement.

Trump’s Republican administration would replace those regulations with around a dozen pages of rules, leaving most of the specifics up to state and local law, said the people familiar with the deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss information that was not yet public and because they feared reprisal.

In a post on X on Saturday night, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Head Start, said to expect a rule to be published this week. The administration “remains committed to strengthening Head Start by preserving federal investment in the program while advancing reforms that expand access, increase local flexibility, reduce unnecessary administrative burden, and ensure services are delivered effectively to children and families in need,” department spokesperson Emily Hilliard said Monday in an email.

The draft rules would require more documentation from parents who are homeless or unemployed, the people familiar with the deliberations told The Associated Press. An early version of the proposal also would have barred parents who are in the United States illegally from enrolling their children, even if the children are U.S. citizens. It’s unclear whether those provisions will make the final draft.

Head Start, which operates in all 50 states, has long enjoyed robust bipartisan support. But some prominent conservatives in recent years have called for , saying the federal government should get out of the education business at every level. Deregulating the program would deliver a win for them and aligns with the Trump administration’s goals of scrapping rules it views as onerous or unnecessary.

Head Start is designed to target poverty, experts say

Head Start serves more than half a million low-income babies, toddlers and preschoolers nationwide. For families that qualify, it offers free preschool and screenings to identify developmental delays. It also offers supports for families.

If the changes take effect, they could make Head Start unrecognizable, said Khari Garvin, who ran the Office of Head Start under President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

“We’d have the carcass of Head Start,” Garvin said. “You might have a program that’s called Head Start, but in substance it will not be.”

The proposed rules were originally reported in The Bulwark.

Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association, said the organization has yet to see the proposed rules. But he said the potential for a massive overhaul has left the organization on edge.

“We’re very anxious,” Sheridan said. “When it does come out … we’ll be ready to fight back where we need to fight back.”

Still, he emphasized that Head Start centers might not be impacted for months, if the rules get on the books at all. Once the proposal is made public, federal law requires the administration to give at least a month for the public to weigh in on it. Then, once finalized, it may take more time for the rules to take effect. There’s also the potential for a lawsuit to halt implementation.

Current rules cover dental screenings and staff-to-student ratios

Head Start was created as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty and targets the myriad challenges that low-income households face. It serves children and adults alike, coaching parents on reaching their goals, connecting them with services and even employing them.

Head Start operators, which include school districts and nonprofit organizations, are required to provide medical, dental and vision screenings for children and to monitor them for developmental delays. There’s also a curriculum framework and prohibitions on physical and emotional abuse of children.

Many of the features that make Head Start distinct from mainstream preschools are spelled out in 122 pages of performance standards. The Trump administration’s proposal would toss most of that rule book and replace it with a much shorter version that eliminates or loosens many requirements, the people familiar with the proposal said. But the proposal also calls for some new regulations, such as requiring all instruction in English.

Requirements around staff-to-student ratios and safety standards would be erased. Operators instead would be instructed to follow local and state laws, which are often far more permissive. And the new proposal also says nothing about suspensions and expulsions, the people said, making it easier for programs to  who are difficult to educate.

Head Start is under threat

Head Start, which has enjoyed robust bipartisan support for decades, has faced several threats since Trump . Project 2025,  authored by the official who is now Trump’s budget chief, called for the federal government to get rid of the program altogether. Last year, in a draft budget, the administration proposed exactly that, saying: “The federal government should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations, and performance standards for any form of education.” After public outcry, Health Secretary , whose department oversees Head Start, told Congress the program’s funding was safe.

Funding for the program was disrupted not long after Trump took office, leading some programs to have to shutter temporarily. It was once again halted after  in October that led some centers briefly to close their doors.

Earlier this year, Trump officials also erased a Biden-era rule that mandated raises and greater benefits for Head Start employees. When the rule went in to effect in 2024, , the majority of whom have bachelor’s degrees, earned less than $40,000 a year on average.

The story was originally published by The Associated Press. Ali Swenson contributed reporting.