Seven years in the past, the Head Begin program solved Priscilla Bahena’s youngster care dilemma, permitting the 21-year-old mother with out mother and father or a associate the flexibility to work and help herself and her new child daughter.
Then the nationwide early childhood training program taught her the right way to be a greater mother, one who might break the cycle of violence that pervaded Bahena’s personal childhood rising up on the South Facet.
Her Head Begin counselors “noticed one thing in me I didn’t see myself,” she says. They urged Bahena to get herself to varsity to turn into a social employee. Now a mother of three, she expects to graduate with a bachelor’s diploma in social work from Northeastern Illinois College in Might.
President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to kill Head Begin subsequent yr as half of a big discount in federal authorities applications and companies. Any trace that the kid care program for low-income households could also be at risk brings Bahena to tears.
“I really feel, oh, man, I’m gonna, I’m getting form of emotional,” says the 28-year-old mother. “Eliminating Head Begin would preserve households poor. It might preserve them uneducated and hungry … hungry for alternatives for high quality of life.”
Bahena, who lives in Brighton Park along with her associate and children — ages 7, 4 and a pair of — is a part of a coalition of Head Begin graduates, mother and father and youngster care suppliers assembling to combat for Head Begin. They wish to preseve the funding of those early childhood training companies that had been based 60 years in the past to fight poverty.
Nationally, this system serves 750,000 children, about 75% of them in what Head Begin deems as “high quality” preschool facilities. The remaining 25% are toddlers, too younger for preschool, who obtain youngster care and residential visits.
Greater than 28,000 younger kids in Illinois are enrolled this system at about 600 facilities, based on the Illinois Head Begin Affiliation, which is coordinating efforts to barrage members of Congress.
In contrast to Republicans’ prior failed efforts to close down Head Begin and redistribute funding to states, this try happens as Trump slashes federal spending and companies, together with applications that Congress has already accredited and funded.
Trump is proposing to remove all Head Begin funding subsequent yr as a part of huge cuts to the Division of Well being and Human Companies, as a number of information retailers have not too long ago reported. That features the Related Press, which obtained a replica of the 64-page draft.
Based on the AP, the draft says, “The funds doesn’t fund Head Begin” which is in keeping with Trump administration’s “objectives of returning management of training to the states and rising parental management. The federal authorities shouldn’t be within the enterprise of mandating curriculum, areas, and efficiency requirements for any type of training.”=
Neither the Workplace of Administration and Finances nor the Division of Well being and Human Companies returned messages in search of remark.
Based on Undertaking 2025, the 900-page blueprint for the substantial restructuring of the federal authorities Trump has been following, Head Begin “ought to be eradicated.”
In January, a government-wide funding freeze quickly prevented some Head Begin suppliers nationwide from making payroll. Then on April 1, Chicago-based staffers who labored for a variety of federal applications geared toward serving to struggling kids and households had been terminated. Their workplace was considered one of 5 nationwide that was shuttered — within the “highest price cities” as an Well being and Human Companies spokeswoman later stated.
Nicole Robinson leads the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago, which helps 1,600 youngster care suppliers primarily in Lake, DuPage and Kane counties.
“Once we resolve to disinvest and defund kids’s training, we additionally disinvest and defund our workforce. We restrict our worker prospects and our management prospects, and it simply is a blow to the whole group,” says Robinson, a Head Begin graduate. “Dad and mom are riled up … so for us, defunding or de-investing in youngster care is a non-starter. We predict it must be invested in additional and expanded. So persons are at a spot the place we wish to elevate the alarm bell.”
The sudden shuttering of the Chicago workplace prompted Democratic Illinois Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth to co-sign a letter to Well being and Human Companies officers noting the “confusion and chaos” the cuts created and warned the affect will devastate the financial system “if kids fail to obtain care, youngster care workers lose their jobs and oldsters can’t go to work.”
Bahena says she hopes tales like hers will resonate with lawmakers.
“It’s not that I don’t nonetheless wrestle to love pay my payments, as a result of I do, as a result of I’m a full-time scholar and a full-time mother or father, and I’m going to highschool so I might get a greater job, proper?” she says. “However I really feel like I’d be struggling in a really completely different manner, and I’d have a lot much less high quality of life than I do now.”
Contributing: Lynn Candy
