New federal guidelines mandate a pay boost for Head Start staff. Can child care centers afford it?

Hundreds of Head Start program leaders from all over the nation are in Washington, D.C., this week to talk to their congressional delegations. Members of the National Head Start Association from Alaska to Florida are all asking for the same thing: enough money to pay their staff.

Head Start provides child care, early education and services like health care and dental to more than 800,000 children in low-income families nationwide. The Biden-Harris administration enacted a new rule in August that requires Head Start programs to increase teacher salaries to be comparable to their public school counterparts over the next seven years, an estimated $10,000 salary bump for most. Large operators will have to provide health benefits to employees, and increase access to mental health supports.

The changes, which were proposed last year, are all a response to the early child care workforce crisis that has closed 1 in 5 Head Start classrooms nationwide, despite waiting lists for children to get into programs.

But the new rule didn’t come with additional funding from Congress, and Head Start program directors have responded much like Alaska’s Mark Lackey: “It’s great in theory, but it needs a lot of money to become a reality.”

Head Start providers negotiate grants for services directly with the federal government. Lackey said his grant money is a fixed amount, even as his costs go up. He said he knows he needs to pay staff more at his care centers in Wasilla — and he wants to do so. But, he gave a short laugh, “there is no way we can,” he said.

Lackey is meeting with the state’s federal delegation — Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan and Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola — to ask them to fund cost of living increases for the federal program’s grantees, who serve 3,000 children a year in Alaska.

He said Head Start programs are foundational nationwide, but they are especially important for the sparsely populated state.

“In Alaska, we have very little else. Our infrastructure is so limited and our workforce is so limited that Head Start is just crucial to our state. If we serve fewer kids, those kids will not have a chance to get services anywhere else, especially with the state budget being so tight,” he said.

Congress has supported Head Start for 60 years; the federal government pays for 80% of the program. But rising costs and diminishing state funding in Alaska have left Head Start programs poorly equipped to retain qualified staff. The state used to match the remaining 20%, but its contribution has dwindled down to about half of that in the last decade. For the last two years Alaska lawmakers have voted to meet the match, but Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed half the increase this year and most of the funding last year.

The effect has been closed classrooms and decreased access to the services for Alaskans. Lackey’s program, CCS Early Learning, closed one care center and gave up 95 slots over the last year because of an inability to hire and retain staff. In Nome, provider Deb Trowbridge may have to close all but one of four area centers for lack of staff, even after offering up to $500 a day to emergency substitute teachers with college degrees to keep the doors open. Last year, seven Alaska programs were on notice that they may lose federal funding because they were underenrolled.

Even with a seven-year runway, Lackey said he is unsure how to make his program bring in enough money that he can pay teachers more.

“What the (federal) administration has said is to reduce the number of kids you serve, and that’s not an acceptable answer,” he said. His program has had a waitlist for years; there are more than 50 children on it. “The purpose of the program is not to give fewer children a head start. It’s to give all the kids that are eligible a head start.”

Federal Head Start Director Khari Garvin said the plan set out by the Biden-Harris administration is achievable.

“We can pay for the quality that this sector needs and deserves, and also at the same time serve children and families that need the service,” Garvin said.

He pointed out that the federal guidance that accompanies the new rule allows Head Starts to eliminate only the slots that are already empty because programs do not have enough staff to fill them — there are legal limits to how many children may be overseen by one person — and that under the new rule, the government will continue to pay for the unfilled space. He said that change allows programs to reinvest the money in staff salaries.

Additionally, small programs that serve fewer than 200 children are exempted from certain requirements, including the wage parity requirement, as long as they make progress toward raising wages.

Those exemptions are important for small providers in remote Alaska, which bear all the burdens of urban providers in addition to smaller hiring pools and higher costs.

The federal administration has already secured $2.5 billion for the program, $1 billion of which was COVID relief, Garvin said in defense of the lack of new funding for the requirements.

He said the new rule is intended to break a cycle that is keeping Head Start programs on the rocks.

“The cycle is that you have classrooms that are either empty or closed because and you have children who can’t be served because there aren’t enough qualified staff that the Head Start program can attract,” he said, adding that it is not sustainable to pay experienced, credentialed employees a wage that does not cover the true cost of living.

And he pointed specifically to a concern from the Biden-Harris administration that the program be equitable. The people who staff Head Start programs tend to be women or women of color, he said.

While programs have seven years to implement the wage parity with public schools piece of the new rule, other parts of the rule need to be in place as soon as late October. Those include a provision that allows excessive housing costs to be deducted from a family’s annual income to increase their odds of being eligible for a place in the program and a provision that requires programs to have health and mental health advisory committees.

Lackey said that implementing the new rule without securing additional federal funding first feels like a political move: Instead of directly pressuring Congress for money, the administration’s rule puts a new burden on providers, who then turn to Congress for relief.

“Without this rule, it’s been easy for the administration to point at Congress and Congress to point at the administration. And with this rule, the ball is in Congress’s court,” he said.

Which is why he and more than 200 Head Start leaders from all 50 states and Puerto Rico have inundated lawmaker calendars with meetings this week to ask for funding that will allow their programs to keep up with the cost of living.

Lackey said it’s a daunting task, but he said he feels energized by the number of people who are advocating for the same thing.

“We’ll see if Congress is listening, or if Congress is just worried about the upcoming election,” he said.

Originally published by the Alaska Beacon, an independent, nonpartisan news organization that covers Alaska state government.