The D.C. area’s youngest children might escape the cuts that are shaving education budgets.
On Tuesday, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors is slated to accept more than $600,000 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to expand Early Head Start to 40 children and their families. The program — an offshoot of the federal government’s original Head Start — provides health and education to pregnant mothers and children from newborns through 3 years old, living below the poverty level.
In Montgomery County, child care provider Centro Nia was one of three agencies in Maryland this year to win a federal grant also to expand Early Head Start. The grant is worth about $900,000 and will allow for more than 70 new toddlers and pregnant mothers, said Julia Howell Barros, who directs fundraising for the center.
Extra dollars for Early Head Start “is the one nice light at the end of the tunnel,” Howell Barros said. “Everything else is status quo.”
In both counties, federal stimulus dollars are funding the expansion, which means the additional slots for the counties’ poorest children could be taken back by late 2011, when the stimulus funds run out.
The influx of federal dollars also funded a $24 million grant in Maryland to provide child care subsidies for low-income families, said Rolf Grafwallner, the state’s assistant superintendent for early childhood development.
“Once that money is gone it will have to be replaced by something else, and that’s the big question right now,” Grafwallner said.
In the District, the D.C. Council has allocated almost $22 million toward a law passed in May 2008 designed to provide pre-kindergarten services for every 3- and 4-year-old in the city. Earlier this month, the council passed another bill to “jump-start the implementation” of the program because the Office of the State Superintendent of Education “is disappointingly far behind in meeting the goals,” said Chairman Vincent Gray.
The future of that bill depends on how well the city does finding the dollars to finance the expansion.
“There are a lot of crossed fingers within the early childhood and Head Start community that some sort of federal funding will be proposed in the [fiscal] 2011 budget that will prevent a dramatic drop-off,” said Lisa Guernsey, director of the New America Foundation’s Early Education Initiative. “Whether that will happen — or more importantly, whether Congress will go along — remains an open question.”
