Head Start not slowing down

October is National Head Start Awareness Month and given the turbulence of the past year, the cost-free program has had to adapt to a battered pandemic economy.

Head Start director Julie Lang said Head Start is not only focused on giving children the appropriate educational bedrock for kindergarten, but the social and emotional techniques that will prepare them going forward.

“Head Start is a federally-funded preschool program for income eligible kids and it provides preschool programming for 3-to-5-year-olds and its a comprehensive program which not only deals with academic or educational things, but is kind of looking at the whole child and ensures that their physical, mental health, oral health and all of those things are taken care of to make sure that they can learn optimally,” she said.

The Creston Head Start program serves 113 children from the counties of Union, Madison, Adams, Taylor and Ringgold. Lang said her program is keeping up amid staffing shortages statewide.

“Actually we’ve been doing very well,” Lang said. “They know that in the last couple years, with everything going on thats it’s been a struggle to keep fully enrolled, it’s been a struggle to keep staff, like everywhere else, and so there’s been funding to help us with whatever we need to do to recruit, be able to incentivize anything for staff,”

Creston Head Start’s ability to keep their staff is attributed to helping them receive their certifications.

“Our staff needs to be four-year degree, if we’re working with any of the school districts for statewide voluntary programming then they have to have a teaching license, so most all of our teachers do, some of them are still working on that, so we have an option for helping staff going back to school finishing two-year degrees, four-year degrees, whatever we can do to help staff as well to grow in their educational journey as well,” Lang said.

Where other programs in the state have fallen behind, Creston’s Head Start program finds an advantage in being smaller than the rest.

“I feel very fortunate that given the whole state of the state, lots of other Head Start programs have been down 15 staff, 25 staff, 35 staff,” Lang said. “Now we’re the smallest program in Iowa, so we had no turnover during the spring until the fall.”

Lang also said her staff’s commitment to their teaching programs carry over into their commitment to the classroom.

“Now I attribute that to the number of our teaching staff, teaching staff meaning teacher or associate in the classroom, that they are involved with what’s called the TEACH program of Iowa, so that they’re going back to school, so they’re kind of committed, they have to sign a contract in order to get some of their school paid for, to be able to get a bonus from the TEACH program. So we’ve had seven or eight staff who are involved with this program and they’re still working on it therefore, we didn’t have any turnover,” she said.

The income-eligibility for Head Start is at 100% of poverty, which Lang said could amount to a family of four making $26,500 per year. However, recently, some families who don’t qualify have enrolled their child and have been given an option to financially contribute.

“In the last several years we’ve had some people who wanted to be in Head Start, but they don’t qualify, they might be over income, we do have a private pay option and we also work with the local Early Childhood Iowa Program in so there are scholarships available,” Lang said.

The mix of economic backgrounds in the program do not permit Head Start to discriminate in the classroom based on their ability to pay.

“If they are eligible for that scholarship, or to at least pay for part of it, then we’re taking other kids besides income-eligible which, really a positive thing about that is all the kids are integrated, so we’re not segregating; ‘Here’s the high-income kids, here’s the low-income kids;’ let’s put them all together, because that’s what they’re going to experience when they go to kindergarten,” Lang said.

Head Start’s commitment to the health of the children also includes their immunizations and physicals.

“We also make sure our kids are up to date with immunizations, up to date with a physical, make sure that all kids have some sort of an oral health screening, we work with I-Smiles program to do some preventative care on some kids, so they come in twice a year,” Lang said.

Parents are also guided with their children in a separate piece of the program to have their needs communicated.

“Another key factor about Head Start is that there is a significant parent piece to our program, so not only are the kids receiving educational resources in a classroom, but the families are also receiving information or referrals based on maybe the needs they might have,” Lang said.

A professional observes the classrooms indiscriminately and the screenings Head Start offers are at no additional cost to any of the families.

“It’s important that we’re basing our classroom structure on what’s appropriate for 3-to-5-year-olds and also looking at the overall mental health climate of our classroom; so making sure that they have the right tools and social and emotional health in the classroom, so we usually have a professional that usually looks at the overall social and emotional health of our classroom so if someone is struggling, ‘Do they need referrals?’ We do screenings that kind of cover comprehensive social and emotional health,” Lang said.

Head Start staff have been trained to address the trauma children have experienced in their personal lives and how they have possibly been affected by the pandemic.

“We focused this whole last year on trauma and what trauma might do to affect the learning of the kids in our classroom, so our staff were trained this last year to kind of take a step back and think about what maybe some of the things kids have dealt with in the first few years of their life so maybe they’re using some yoga techniques or some breathing techniques to kind of maybe kind of decompress kids so they are better able to learn in the classroom,” Lang said.

For National Head Start Awareness month, Head Start is having a free grab-and-go lunch 11:30 a.m. — 1:30 p.m. Oct. 29 at 209 N. Elm St.