Federal Cuts Hit Head Start Transportation

By Ryan Gray | Associate Editor

WASHINGTON , D.C. - Nationwide Head Start agencies constricted by funding that barely keeps pace with inflation face eliminating or drastically reducing pupil transportation services, the National Head Start Association says.

A NHSA survey released Oct. 27 shows that 80 percent of 379 responding agencies polled nationwide cannot afford to purchase new school buses required to meet new age-, height- and weight-appropriate child safety restraint standards, or the requirement for one adult monitor onboard every bus. Another 50 percent responded to the May 2004 survey by saying they are considering cutting transportation, altogether. More than four of five grantees surveyed said that reducing bus service for students would "extremely" discourage enrollment.

Meanwhile, Congress failed to reauthorize Head Start before adjourning for the holidays. The entire process begins anew this month. President Bush also tabbed EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt as the next secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Head Start. If approved by Congress, Leavitt would replace Tommy Thompson and switch seats in the presidential cabinet.

NHSA purports that three years of "neglect and disdain" by the Bush Administration and an expected 2005 budget that could be the lowest in the last 15 years indicates that the federal low income pre-school program as a whole could be destined for the refuse bin.

"Programs have been left on their own," said Sarah Greene, NHSA president and CEO.

The Department of Health and Human Services' Administration of Children & Families, under which the National Head Start Bureau operates, declined comment for this article.

Last winter, HHS extended the deadline for meeting 45 CFR 1310.11, child restraints, and CFR 1310.15, bus monitors, to Jan. 18, 2006 , of which Greene said NHSA members were "grateful." But she added that is of little solace to agencies still forced to somehow come up with funding.

"There's been no announcement or direction from the federal government as for assistant to local agencies to meet these requirements," she said, pointing to previous administrations that gave Head Start agencies better direction on how to fund "unexpected or high-cost kinds of services."

Of greater concern is the lifeline of Head Start, in general.

Reauthorization Questions

An additional $123 million was appropriated last year for Head Start programs nationwide, up from about $6.66 billion in 2003. Congress failed to vote in the fall on 2005 reauthorization and funding, forcing the 40-year-old program to operate under a "continuing resolution" that kept funding at fiscal year 2004 levels and pushed the responsibility of forging a new mandate to the 109 th congressional session that convenes this month. NHSA said about $7.5 billion in funding is necessary this year to ensure that all local agencies could help serve all eligible pre-school children in their jurisdictions, and deal with skyrocketing insurance, unemployment and liability costs.

"Any additional expense is why agencies are seeing their programs hurting for money," Greene said, with agencies being forced to reduce or cut transportation services entirely. Some are getting by, she added, by contracting with other vendors or local school districts.

"You've got 80 to 90 percent of your families saying they need transportation. But if you don't have the funds, you're not meeting the needs," she said.

Even deeper cuts could ravage Head Start in 2006, as t he Bush Administration plans to cut funding for Head Start by $177 million. NHSA said nearly 38,000 children would be turned away if enacted. Ron Herndon, chairman of the NHSA board of directors, said that funding levels the past four years under President Bush have yet to equal those set forth by his father in 1992, the last year of his term.

In 2000, Head Start received almost a $1 billion increase to nearly $6.2 billion. In President Bush's first year in office, funding rose about $340 million, which Greene said took many agencies from being able to fully staff and fund its programs to allocating money only to those required by federal law.

Said Herndon, who is also the director of the Albina Head Start program in Portland , Ore. , " Head Start programs are being put into a 10-foot hole and the Bush Administration is giving us a 5-foot ladder . The result is a largely hidden legacy of neglect and disdain that is clearly part of a de facto effort to dismantle Head Start."

Success, Nonetheless

Meanwhile, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study monitoring Head Start data concluded last spring that the program is succeeding. It found that 89 percent of the nation's grantees had no major compliance problems for the 2002 fiscal year, a three percent increase from 2001.

But both the NHSA and members of Congress took umbrage with the way they said the report took liberties with the numbers from reporting categories used in previous HHS monitoring reports, an apparent "clumsy and transparent attempt to invert positive findings about Head Start grantees in order to make them look bad."

"The Administration's own results clearly show that the vast majority of Head Start programs are meeting the federal government's high quality standards," said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), a senior member of the House Education and the Workforce Committee. "But because the Administration is determined to eviscerate those federal standards and allow the program to have standards that vary from state to state, it has chosen to distort the independent findings of its own evaluators." 

Tightening Purse Strings

In a separate survey also conducted last spring, NHSA said that nearly 9,000 slots for poor children have been trimmed from the program, and the percentage of eligible children served by Head Start and Early Head Start programs has eroded to 20 percent participation. Meanwhile, half of all local Head Start grantees have been forced to cut all services and staffing during the past two years.

"It may turn out that the most effective way to 'prove' the case for dismantling Head Start is by making it quite literally impossible for local grantees to do their job," Green said.

The surveys found that m any local programs have responded to dwindling federal support in the following ways: 12 percent were forced to cut the number of children served; 18 percent laid off teachers; 27 percent laid off other staff; 40 percent cut back hours or calendar year; and 52 percent cut parent and/or staff training.

As for dealing with expected fiscal year 2005 cuts, the survey found that 20 percent of programs will cut the number of children served; 23 percent will lay off teachers; 50 percent will lay off other staff; 46 percent will cut back hours or calendar year; and 65 percent will cut training. According to NHSA's analysis of U.S. Census data, only 20 percent of eligible U.S. children aged zero to five years old are actually in the Head Start and Early Head Start programs.