Seven years ago, the Head Start program solved Priscilla Bahena’s child care dilemma, allowing the 21-year-old mom without parents or a partner the ability to work and support herself and her new baby daughter.
Then the national early childhood education program taught her how to be a better mom, one who could break the cycle of violence that pervaded Bahena’s own childhood growing up on the South Side.
Her Head Start counselors “saw something in me I didn’t see myself,” she says. They urged Bahena to get herself to college to become a social worker. Now a mom of three, she expects to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in social work from Northeastern Illinois University in May.
President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to kill Head Start next year as part of a large reduction in federal government programs and services. Any hint that the child care program for low-income families may be in danger brings Bahena to tears.
“I feel, oh, man, I’m gonna, I’m getting kind of emotional,” says the 28-year-old mom. “Eliminating Head Start would keep families poor. It would keep them uneducated and hungry … hungry for opportunities for quality of life.”
Bahena, who lives in Brighton Park with her partner and kids — ages 7, 4 and 2 — is part of a coalition of Head Start graduates, parents and child care providers assembling to fight for Head Start. They want to preserve the funding of these early childhood education services that were founded 60 years ago to combat poverty.
Nationally, the program serves 750,000 kids, about 75% of them in what Head Start deems as “quality” preschool centers. The remaining 25% are toddlers, too young for preschool, who receive child care and home visits.
More than 28,000 young children in Illinois are enrolled the program at about 600 centers, according to the Illinois Head Start Association, which is coordinating efforts to barrage members of Congress.
Unlike Republicans’ prior failed efforts to shut down Head Start and redistribute funding to states, this attempt occurs as Trump slashes federal spending and services, including programs that Congress has already approved and funded.
Trump is proposing to eliminate all Head Start funding next year as part of massive cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services, as several news outlets have recently reported. That includes the Associated Press, which obtained a copy of the 64-page draft.
According to the AP, the draft says, “The budget does not fund Head Start” which is consistent with Trump administration’s “goals of returning control of education to the states and increasing parental control. The federal government should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations, and performance standards for any form of education.”=
Neither the Office of Management and Budget nor the Department of Health and Human Services returned messages seeking comment.
According to Project 2025, the 900-page blueprint for the substantial restructuring of the federal government Trump has been following, Head Start “should be eliminated.”
In January, a government-wide funding freeze temporarily prevented some Head Start providers nationwide from making payroll. Then on April 1, Chicago-based staffers who worked for a range of federal programs aimed at helping struggling children and families were terminated. Their office was one of five nationwide that was shuttered — in the “highest cost cities” as an Health and Human Services spokeswoman later said.
Nicole Robinson leads the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago, which supports 1,600 child care providers primarily in Lake, DuPage and Kane counties.
“When we decide to disinvest and defund children’s education, we also disinvest and defund our workforce. We limit our employee prospects and our leadership prospects, and it just is a blow to the entire community,” says Robinson, a Head Start graduate. “Parents are riled up … so for us, defunding or de-investing in child care is a non-starter. We think it needs to be invested in more and expanded. So people are at a place where we want to raise the alarm bell.”
The sudden shuttering of the Chicago office prompted Democratic Illinois Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth to co-sign a letter to Health and Human Services officials noting the “confusion and chaos” the cuts created and warned the impact will devastate the economy “if children fail to receive care, child care staff lose their jobs and parents cannot go to work.”
Bahena says she hopes stories like hers will resonate with lawmakers.
“It’s not that I don’t still struggle to like pay my bills, because I do, because I’m a full-time student and a full-time parent, and I’m going to school so I could get a better job, right?” she says. “But I feel like I would be struggling in a very different way, and I would have much less quality of life than I do now.”
Contributing: Lynn Sweet
t