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California Head Start Programs Caught Up in Trump’s Funding Freeze

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Five-year-old Chloe draws flowers at Lincoln Square Park in Oakland on Friday, May 24, 2024. Last year, the city of Oakland introduced its “Ready, Set, Go” vehicle, an RV converted into a Head Start classroom, which travels to homeless shelters, providing educational and social services to families experiencing housing instability. (Gina Castro/KQED)

Some Head Start programs in California were swept up in the confusion over President Donald Trump’s directive to freeze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans, reporting that they temporarily lost access to an online payment system on Tuesday morning.

The programs regained access to funds after the White House insisted that its order doesn’t apply to child care, housing assistance and other vital programs.

Trump administration officials said the decision to pause federal funding was necessary to ensure that the spending aligns with the president’s priorities. However, a judge temporarily blocked the administration’s objective after a group of nonprofits and states, including California, challenged the directive in court.

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The turnaround capped a dramatic and stressful day for Head Start and other nonprofits across the country that receive funding from the federal government.

Some Head Start programs run on very tight budgets, and if they can’t draw those funds, they risk closing their doors in a matter of days, said Melanee Cottrill, executive director of Head Start California, an association that serves up to 85,000 children in the early education program.

Two mothers play with their young children on a green rug inside a classroom.
Families play with their children inside Oakland’s Head Start mobile classroom on May 24, 2024. (Gina Castro/KQED)

“There are a couple of programs that I heard from this morning that did anticipate having to close their doors within a day or two if this pause was implemented,” Cottrill said.

Early childhood education advocates worry the confusion or uncertainty over Trump’s spending freeze will discourage families from enrolling in Head Start.

Mary Ignatius, executive director of Parent Voices, said her grassroots organization often fields calls from parents anxious about the fate of their food, housing or child care assistance benefits.

“We have to be able to provide some kind of hopeful assurance, but it’s very difficult to do that when the news is changing so rapidly,” Ignatius said. “It’s very difficult to understand what is the truth.”

She said hearing about interruptions to the payment system gave her pause.

“I was just thinking Congress had already passed funding for these programs, so does he even have the authority to do this,” she said, referring to the new president. “Hearing from folks who can’t access [the] Head Start payment system made me feel like, ‘oh wait, actually maybe there are some teeth to this,’” she said.

The federal Office of Head Start also sent out an email on Tuesday morning saying it was ordered not to communicate with anyone externally. For Donna Sneeringer, vice president and chief strategy officer for Child Care Resource Center, an early education and care agency in Southern California, it seemed similar to a memo American public health officials received last week, ordering them to stop working with the World Health Organization.

“I think that this is a dangerous precedent to not allow organizations like ours, who do business with the government, to communicate and understand the parameters [of the funding freeze],” Sneeringer said.

“And just to have it shut down has tremendous ripple effects that I don’t think have been really thought out,” she said.

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