This report has been in the works for two years, after HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius convened a panel of experts to inform the department on the design of a newly required national evaluation of the program. The call for this panel was a requirement Congress made in its 1998 reauthorization of the Head Start program. It is a separate action from the HHS’ evaluation — determining whether the positive effects of Head Start participation last through third grade — and the much-anticipated national re-competition. The HHS said it intends to announce the agencies that will be awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in Head Start grants in December.

This latest report goes in depth on recommendations for improving the effectiveness of Head Start based in part on the panel’s review and interpretation of previous studies of the program for low-income 4-year-olds and for Early Head Start. One of those previous studies is the Head Start Impact Study, the final piece of which will be the third grade follow-up Congress has been requesting.

In a formal letter by the committee to Secretary Sebelius recapping findings from the study, it did preface by saying that Head Start has a strong infrastructure to support the quality of the program, such as uniform performance standards, a strong technical assistance network and a monitoring system to ensure local programs are meeting these high standards. Yet, the program can be improved, so the committee made recommendations in three major areas: using data to improve school readiness and other key outcomes, using evidence-based practices and improving the coordination of services from prenatal to age 8. 

Federal Head Start Director Yvette Sanchez Fuentes said in a formal statement following the release of this study that her office would use these recommendations “in our ongoing research and programmatic efforts to maintain our high standards and expectations for all Head Start programs. By ensuring we stay ahead of the curve, Head Start can continue to provide underprivileged children with the tools they need to keep pace with their peers in educational, social and emotional development.”

The statement also included a breakdown of some steps the agency already has taken while reviewing the report, including:

• Analyzing data from the Head Start and Early Head Start evaluations to identify the characteristics of programs that are the most effective in achieving Head Start’s goals;

• Convening an expert panel to develop and establish national school readiness goals for both English and dual-language learners;

• Developing a “consumer guide” that will provide information on curriculum and assessment guiding each program in selecting effective tools to collect and analyze data from its own unique population;

• Designing a study to identify effective approaches to teacher coaching; and

• Evaluating the effectiveness of promising parenting interventions that enhance ongoing Early Head Start Services for the most vulnerable infants and toddlers.

The segment took a look back at one migrant family's travels in 1998 from their home in Texas to Michigan to pick blueberries. NBC Correspondent Dennis Murphy caught up with the children, now young adults, to update viewers on their whereabouts today and also followed a new family as it criss-crossed the countryside in search of work.

While it was not clear if the parents were U.S. citizens, Murphy noted that all the children were, meaning they were born here. No matter on what side of the proverbial fence you sit regarding the immigration reform issue, here were real children who face long, hard days spent toiling in the fields when their counterparts back home are either enjoying summer vacation, are attending summer school or are working relatively cushy jobs at the mall. Even those children who spend summer days outside working are perhaps only mowing neighbor's lawns. That's a far cry from traveling 1,500 miles from home and living in a trailer or the family truck for months on end.

There is no set figure for how many children live on the road chasing the next crop that needs to be picked or weeded, but experts interviewed by Dateline said estimates are in the "hundreds of thousands." To work on farms, U.S. child labor laws only dictate that the young boys and girls be at least 14 years old. Meanwhile, labor laws for all other types of jobs mandate a minimum age of 16.

Meanwhile, Head Start agencies across the county served some 32,000 young migrant children and another 2,500 seasonal children in 2010, according to testimony given to Congress by the Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Quality Improvement Center. Most farm worker families also earn less than $10,000 a year and have no health benefits, according to U.S. Department of Labor data cited by the National Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Association. And many of these children receive school bus transportation.

According to the International Initiative to End Child Labor, some 211 million children worldwide between the ages of 5 and 14 are working. The organization says on its web site that at least 60 million are working under dangerous or abusive conditions, with 70 percent of the children working in the agricultural industry.

It's literally back-breaking work, and the days can be 12 or more hours long. The only restriction on hours of employment is that children cannot work during school hours, which isn't an issue during the summer. And what U.S. entity enforces this mandate? The U.S. Department of Labor under the Fair Labor Standards, which also sets the rules for child labor.

For its first broadcast in 1998, Dateline's Murphy showed pictures of migrant children hard at work to Susan King, then the  U.S. assistant secretary of labor.

"What really gets you is—when you see that, is that in this day and age, at the end of this century, we're still seeing pictures that we would have expected to see at the beginning of this century," she said.

Kanawha County, W.Va., resident Faith Bostic watches every day as a school bus passes her house, one that her daughter is not eligible to ride, even though some in her class are. The preschool class her daughter attends in made up of both state-funded and Head Start-funded students. And, as many know, these students are federally required (when funding is available) to ride the yellow bus.

But, as those within the Head Start community also know, only those with an annual income below the poverty line, which currently sits around $17,268 for a family with one child. And, as you can imagine, there are millions of other children whose families barely scrape by and could use any form of assistance possible, including giving their children a "Head Start" in school.

How can poverty be decided upon so strictly? Any parent knows even the bare necessities of raising a child add up quickly. Even with all the programs that exist to help those in dire straits, the families that slightly hover about the feds distinction of poverty go through hard times with very little, if any, help from state and federal aid programs.

The Head Start program was created to give children in low-income families a jump on grade school, to prepare them for a successful academic career, and I applaud their efforts over the last 45 years. But, what about the children who could use the same help? What about children who live in the same neighborhoods but whose parents make slightly more money, not enough to afford day care or a preschool program, but enough to keep them off the registration forms for the local Head Start program? What happens when the fine line between poverty and poor is blurred for too many families to count?

Last month, the National Head Start Association pointed out that Congress had yet to pass a budget resolution to appropriate President Obama's FY 2011 budget request that would would make the $2.1 billion ARRA funding expansion for the federal program part of base grants instead of a one-time supplement in addition to the annual appropriation, which for FY 2011 would be about $8.2 billion, an increase of $989 million for Head Start and Early Head Start, to keep alive ARRA's goal of increasing the number of preschool-age children and infants and toddlers who are eligible for the program.

But, legislators are looking for ways to trim the national deficit. NHSA said that it could lose its previous gains if Congress opts for a continuing resolution rather than an appropriations bill.

The latest news from NHSA was that if the Appropriations Subcommittees on Labor, HHS, Education and Related Agencies decides to pursue an appropriations bill for FY 2011 that is not a CR, the bill mark-up will occur in late July. NHSA members were being asked to write their representatives in the House and the Senate to get on board.

Although not new to the Head Start teachers at Union High (and many across the country), using a crib to transport children was something new to me. The photo of the crib in action was something that first made me laugh, but soon it struck me as to how useful this idea could prove to be in an emergency. As we all know, Head Start programs are not funded to have one teacher per student in the classroom, so how else would they safely and quickly transport the students out of the building in the event of an emergency?

The event was an emergency preparedness drill having to do with the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which is located about five miles from the school. To keep the children distracted while they waited for the buses, the teachers sang "Row, row, row your boat, Gently down the stream," probably not a hard scenario to imagine for the small students considering their form of transportation.