Head Start preschools aim to fight poverty, but their teachers struggle to make ends meet
WASHINGTON — In some ways, Doris Milton is a Head Start success story. She was in one of Chicago’s first Head Start classes, when the anti-poverty program, which aimed to help children succeed by providing them with a top-notch early childhood education, was still in its infancy.
Milton loved her teacher so much that she decided to follow in her footsteps. She now works as a Head Start teacher in Chicago.
After 40 years of service, Milton, 63, makes $22.18 an hour. Her wages put her above the poverty line, but she is far from financially secure. She needs a dental procedure that she can’t afford, and she’s paying off $65,000 in student loan debt from National Louis University, which she got into within two classes of getting her bachelor’s degree. She quit in 2019 when she became ill.
“I’m trying to meet their needs when no one is meeting mine,” Milton said of teaching preschoolers.
Head Start teachers – 70% of whom have a bachelor’s degree – earn an average of $39,000 per year, far less than public school teachers with similar qualifications. President Joe Biden wants to increase their salaries, but Congress has no plans to expand the Head Start budget.
Many have left their jobs — about one in five teachers reassigned in 2022 — for higher-paying positions in restaurants or retail. But if Head Start centers have to raise teacher salaries without additional money, operators say they will have to cut back on the number of children they serve.
The Biden administration says the program is already turning away children because so many teachers have left and there aren’t enough workers in line to take their places. And officials say it makes no sense for an anti-poverty program where people of color make up 60% of the workforce to underpay its workers.
“We have a number of teachers who are themselves earning poverty wages, which undermines the original intent of the program,” said Katie Hamm, deputy assistant secretary at the Office of Early Childhood Development.
Created as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” Head Start serves some of the neediest children, including those who are homeless, in foster care or from households that fall below the federal poverty line. With childcare prices higher than college tuition in many states, Head Start is the only option that is financially viable for many families.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which administers the program, estimates that a pay increase would not have a major effect on the number of children served because so many programs are already struggling to staff all their classrooms. In total, Head Start programs will receive enough funding to cover the cost of 755,000 slots. But many programs cannot fully enroll because they do not have enough teachers. That’s why the department estimates that only about 650,000 of those spots will be filled.
The proposed change would force Head Start programs to permanently downsize because they would not be able to pay as many teachers.
That worries Head Start leaders, even though many of them support raising wages for their workers, said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association. The association asked the Biden administration to allow some programs to opt out of the requirements.
“We think this is a great idea, but it’s going to cost money,” Sheridan said. “And we don’t see Congress appropriating that money overnight.”
While a huge cash injection doesn’t seem imminent, other solutions have been proposed.
On Monday, the Biden administration released a letter urging school districts to spend more of the federal money they receive on early learning, including Head Start.
On Thursday, U.S. Reps. Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J., and Juan Ciscomani, R-Ariz., introduced a bill that would allow Head Start to hire community college students working toward their associate degrees in human resource development children.
The stakes may be highest for Head Starts in rural areas. A program outside Anchorage, Alaska, is closing one of its five locations as it faces a labor shortage. Program director Mark Lackey said the heartbreaking decision allowed him to increase wages for the remaining employees in hopes of reducing employee turnover.
“It hurts, and we don’t want to do it,” Lackey said. “But at the same time, it feels like it’s kind of necessary.”
In total, his program has cut nearly 100 positions due to staff shortages. And the population he serves is very needy: About half of the children are homeless or in foster care. Biden’s proposal could force the program to shrink further.
Amy Esser, executive director of Mercer County Head Start in rural western Ohio, said low wages make it difficult to attract candidates for vacant teaching positions. The starting salary at Celina City Schools is at least $5,000 more than at Head Start, and the jobs require the same qualifications.
But she warned that raising teacher salaries could have disastrous consequences for her program, and for the broader community, which has few child care options for low-income households.
“We would face extinction,” Esser wrote in a letter to the Biden administration, “leaving children and families with little to no opportunity for a safe, nurturing environment to become school-ready.”
Arlisa Gilmore, a longtime Head Start teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, said if it were up to her, she wouldn’t sacrifice a single position to increase teacher pay. She earns $25 an hour and acknowledges that she is lucky: She receives rental income from a home she owns and shares the costs with her husband. The kids in her class aren’t so lucky.
“I don’t think they should eliminate classrooms,” Gilmore said. “We have a huge community of children living in poverty in my facility.”
Milton, the teacher from Chicago, wonders why there should be such a difficult trade-off in the first place.
“Why can’t it be: ‘Let’s both help’? Why do we have to pick and choose?” said Milton. “Don’t we deserve that? Don’t the children deserve that?”
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