WASILLA, Alaska (news agencies) — She was a teenager, and the mother of a 2-year-old, when a knock came on the door of the trailer she called home. Two women were there to tell her about a federally funded preschool program called Head Start that was opening near her home in Chugiak. Would she be interested in enrolling her daughter?
Then pregnant with her second child, Kristine Bayne signed up. She hoped it would make a difference for her daughter. What she didn’t know: It would shift the trajectory of her life, too.
Bayne, who finished high school through correspondence courses after she got pregnant at 16, would go on to take a job with her child’s Head Start. Her confidence buoyed, she returned to school to earn a bachelor’s degree and a counseling certificate from the state. She would rise through the ranks of CCS Early Learning, the nonprofit that ran the region’s Head Start centers, and would retire as a family partnerships coordinator, lending the same kind of help to families that she and her husband received.
“I learned so much,” says Bayne, now 65. “How to take care of my children, how to advocate for them, how to have a voice for myself. … They take you where you’re at, and they help you move forward to become a better person.”
In this part of Alaska, countless parents tell stories like Bayne’s. Head Start has helped them earn degrees that put them on track for better jobs. As drug addiction ravages the community, it has helped parents in recovery and educated children who have ended up in foster care. It has done this while readying youngsters for kindergarten, conditioning them for the school day’s rhythms and teaching them how to be good friends and students.
Which is why it was so wrenching when CCS Early Learning closed the Chugiak Head Start, where Bayne had sent her children. In January, it announced it was shuttering another center — this time in Meadow Lakes, where Bayne’s granddaughter Makayla, who is now in her care, was enrolled.
The impending closure is not for lack of need. This is the fastest-growing part of the 49th state, and the nonprofit’s Head Start program has a waiting list. It can — and did — fill Meadow Lakes’ three classrooms to capacity.
The problem is with the grownups.
Specifically, there are not enough of them who want to work at a Head Start. Not when they can make more money working at the nearby Target, which hiked its pay during the pandemic. And not when, with the same credentials, they can get a better-paying job at the local school district.
As a teacher shortage grinds on, what is unfolding in this corner of the state — a region that contains both massive tracts of untamed wild and a booming Anchorage bedroom community — offers a preview of what other programs could face.
In 2022, nearly a quarter of Head Start teachers left their jobs, some retiring early and others lured away by higher-paying work in retail or at school districts. Without those teachers, the preschools cannot serve as many students as they once did. It means fewer options for parents who want to return to work but cannot afford child care, and fewer early learning opportunities for children from the neediest families. In rural communities, Head Start might be the only child care center for working parents.
The number of children and parents served by Head Start has tumbled precipitously since its peak in 2013. That year, it served 1.1 million children and pregnant people, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which analyzed federal data. Nine years later, its enrollment stood at around 786,000.
Some of the children who would have enrolled in Head Start instead migrated to state-funded preschool programs, which have expanded. There are also fewer babies being born. Still, the percentage of children in poverty heading to preschool has been unchanged for two decades, which concerns researchers like Steve Barnett, of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.
“The fewer resources (children) have at home, the more they benefit from high-quality environments” like Head Start, Barnett says. Without it, he said, they show up in kindergarten further behind their classmates from middle- and upper-income households.
In Wasilla, the regional Head Start group decided to raise employee pay to keep more staff from leaving. To do that, it had to close one center. Mark Lackey, executive director of CCS Early Learning, found he was competing for employees with the service sector, which raised pay during the pandemic to lure back reluctant workers. Last year, CCS Early Learning was paying teacher aides with two years on the job about $16 an hour, while Target was offering more than $17 to entry-level employees, Lackey said.
“It’s just tragic,” Lackey says. “There’s so many more kids we could be serving.”
Meadow Lakes’ Head Start was tucked into a strip mall off a four-lane highway, its pine green facade sandwiched between a charter school and a laundromat that offered showers. The kids who arrived there were sometimes smiling, sometimes crying, often carrying tiny backpacks to fit their small frames.
They came from households where their caretakers were often struggling with problems too complex for them to understand: poverty, illness, financial strife, homelessness. Their caregivers included teen parents daunted by the responsibility of raising children, and grandparents who had unexpectedly taken in grandchildren.
Head Start was there to help all of them.
Its pioneering, multigenerational approach sought to build healthy environments for the children it served — and that meant supporting the adults in their lives, too. Many of the parents who sent their kids to Meadow Lakes attended Head Start themselves, like Cha Na Xiong, who had a child at the school. The son of Hmong refugees, he went to Head Start to learn English, allowing him to get a grasp on the language before he started kindergarten.
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