WASILLA, Alaska (AP) — She was a teenager and the mother of a 2-year-old girl when there was a knock on the door of the trailer where she lived. 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 was that it would also change the trajectory of her life.
Bayne, who completed high school by correspondence after getting pregnant at 16, later found a job with her child’s Head Start program. Her confidence was boosted, and she returned to school to earn a state license and certification as a guidance counselor. She rose through the ranks at CCS Early Learning, the nonprofit that ran the area’s Head Start centers, and retired as a family partnership coordinator, providing the same kind of support to families that she and her husband received.
“I learned a lot,” says Bayne, now 65. “How to take care of my children, how to advocate for them, how to make myself heard.[…]They take you where you are and help you grow into a better person.”
In this part of Alaska, countless parents tell stories like Bayne’s. Head Start has helped them get degrees It has given them access to better jobs. As drug addiction ravages the community, she has helped parents recover and educated children who ended up in foster care. She has done all this while preparing young people for kindergarten, conditioning them for the rhythms of the school day and teaching them to be good friends and good students.
That’s why the closure of Chugiak Head Start, where Bayne had sent her children, was so painful for CCS Early Learning. In January, it announced it was closing another center, this time in Meadow Lakes, where Bayne’s granddaughter, Makayla, was enrolled and is now in its care.
Not enough adults
The impending closure isn’t due to a lack of need. It’s the fastest-growing region in the 49th state, and the nonprofit’s Head Start program has a waiting list. It could fill Meadow Lakes’ three classrooms to capacity, which it has done.
The problem comes from adults.
In particular, not enough of them want to work at a Head Start center. Not when they can make more money working at a nearby Target store, which has raised its wages during the pandemic. And not when, with the same qualifications, they can get a higher-paying job in the local school district.
As the teacher shortage continues, what’s happening in this corner of the state — a region that contains both vast expanses of wilderness and a booming residential community in Anchorage — offers a glimpse of what other programs might face.
By 2022, nearly a quarter of Head Start teachers had left their jobs, some taking early retirement and others being lured to higher-paying jobs in retail or school districts. Without these teachers, preschools can’t serve as many students as they once did. That means fewer options for parents who want to return to work but can’t afford child care, and fewer early learning opportunities for children from the poorest families. In rural communities, Head Start may be the only child care for working parents.
The number of children and parents in Head Start’s care has fallen precipitously since its peak in 2013. That year, the program served 1.1 million children and pregnant women, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which analyzed federal data. Nine years later, its enrollment stood at about 786,000.
Some of the children who should have been enrolled in Head Start have migrated to state-funded preschool programs, which have expanded. The number of births has also declined. Yet the percentage of poor children in preschool has not changed in two decades, a concern for researchers like Steve Barnett of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.
“The fewer resources kids have at home, the more they benefit from quality environments” like Head Start, Barnett says. Without it, he says, they arrive in kindergarten behind their classmates from middle- and upper-income families.
In Wasilla, the regional Head Start group decided to raise employee wages to keep more staff from leaving. To do so, it had to close one center. Mark Lackey, executive director of CCS Early Learning, found he was competing for employees with the service industry, which raised wages during the pandemic to lure reluctant workers. Last year, CCS Early Learning paid teaching assistants with two years of seniority about $16 an hour, while Target offered entry-level employees more than $17, Lackey said.
“It’s just tragic,” Lackey said. “There are so many more kids we could be helping.”
A fence without a fence
Meadow Lakes Head Start sat in a strip mall next to a four-lane highway, its pine-green facade wedged between a charter school and a laundromat that offered showers. The children who arrived sometimes smiled, sometimes cried, often carrying tiny backpacks that fit their small size.
They came from families where their caregivers were often struggling with problems too complex for them: poverty, illness, financial difficulties, homelessness. They included teenage parents discouraged by the responsibility of raising children, and grandparents who had unexpectedly welcomed their grandchildren.
Head Start was there to help them all.
Her pioneering, multigenerational approach focused on creating healthy environments for the children she served, which also meant supporting the adults around them. Many parents who sent their children to Meadow Lakes had attended Head Start themselves, like Cha Na Xiong, who had a child in the school. The son of Hmong refugees, he went to Head Start to learn English, which allowed him to become fluent in the language before entering kindergarten.
Kendra Mitchell, whose mother had her at 16, also benefited from Head Start and sent her son Wayne to Meadow Lakes School. He will start kindergarten next year, but she said she has seen how it has shaped his life — and hers.
“He’s actually, you know, verbalizing his emotions and learning to regulate his emotions at such a young age, which is extremely difficult,” Mitchell said.
Wayne’s childhood was marked by instability, as Mitchell struggled with addiction and sent him to live with relatives. Wayne moved back in with her when she entered rehab. When she enrolled him in Head Start, she said the staff welcomed her without judgment and helped connect her with resources as she got back on her feet. She told the staff she was living in a shack with no running water; they gave her a voucher so she could take Wayne to the nearby laundromat to shower and do his laundry.
“They weren’t just supporting our son. They were supporting us,” Mitchell says.
Saying goodbye one last time
In May, the Meadow Lakes children came and went for the last time. Classes began with routines that had become familiar to them. The children sang a song to learn the days of the week, set to the tune of the “Addams Family” theme. They talked about the weather (it was raining that day), then lined up to wash their hands before sitting at two long tables for breakfast.
A school day was more than anyone could have imagined. Every activity was loaded with lessons, big and small. As they talked about the calendar—it was May 6—they practiced saying “sixth.” Teacher Lisa Benson-Nuyen asked them to “pretend their tongues were little turtle heads coming out of their shells.” She also taught them that the last day of school could bring many feelings.
“For some people, it’s a happy face. For others, it’s a sad face,” Benson-Nuyen said.
At breakfast, the children learned that blueberries should not be put in their ears. Then came tooth brushing and play. All of these routines were designed to help the children feel safe and learn responsibility. And every conflict with a classmate was an opportunity to teach the children how to interact with each other and manage their emotions. That’s why the classroom had a “comfort corner,” a cozy space with pillows where at least one student often snuggled.
Last week, there were small signs that things were coming to an end. The classroom walls, always decorated in bright colors, were no longer covered in students’ artwork. Teachers began discussing what to do with the class pets. On the last day, the staff tried to keep the mood cheerful and festive, even as they struggled to keep their composure. They painted students’ hair bright colors and threw a dance party.
Eryn Martin, the program office assistant, said to Mitchell as she left for the last time: “Good luck, Kendra! You’ve worked really hard and I’m proud of you.”
Martin, herself a Head Start graduate and the mother of a former student, had been crying on and off all day, and her cheeks were wet with tears again. Willow Palmer put into practice what she had learned in class: When people are upset, she can comfort them. The 5-year-old rushed into the classroom, then reappeared with a neon-green stuffed frog. She gave it to Martin. Then she leaned over and picked it up, too.
That day, in the playground, students released butterflies they had been watching for weeks in their classrooms as they emerged from their cocoons. They were now adults. They flew away into the fresh spring air, away from school and into the unknown.
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