Sitting at a blueberry blue table in a Head Start classroom in Pullman, Mich., about an hour south of Grand Rapids, preschool teacher Julie Beck helps a little girl draw a rainbow with crayons. Nearby, longtime assistant Norma Silva kneads Play-Doh with the children.
The kids think they're just playing, but Miss Julie and Miss Norma, as they're known, teach in a subtle, graceful tandem, sneaking in learning about directional words (the next stripe can go inside or outside the rainbow) or letter sounds (the Play-Doh becomes a "C" as in "c-c-c-cat!").
"We teach them so much," Beck says with a laugh. "It's fun though. The kids don't know they're learning."
This was the goal when the federal Head Start program began in 1965 — to provide high-quality preschool and wraparound support for children and families in poverty. Today, though, Head Start is in crisis, because its teachers get paid so little that many also live in poverty. Or quit.
"I'm paycheck to paycheck. I had to take out a loan for the summer," says Beck, who earns roughly $20 an hour, 10 months a year. "I'm about one car payment behind," she laughs.
After adjusting for inflation, the average salary of a Head Start teacher increased less than 1% between 2010 and 2023, from $41,389 to $41,691, according to the Biden administration.
Compare that to the average salary of a preschool teacher in a public school classroom in 2022: $53,200.
This low pay has created a crisis of churn. The Biden administration reports that, nationally, nearly 1 in 5 Head Start teachers quit last year.
The Biden administration hopes to stabilize things with a new rule, requiring local programs to pay their teachers as much as $10,000 a year more.
"Head Start was created to interrupt the cycle of poverty," says Katie Hamm of the Administration for Children and Families, which administers Head Start. "So if we are going into high-poverty communities and paying poverty wages, that in fact perpetuates poverty."
There's just one problem with this new rule: It doesn't come with new funding. And, with Congress showing little interest in a boost, making local programs foot the bill could force some to find the money by serving fewer children.
What it's like living on a Head Start salary
A six-hour drive north of Beck's room, in Munising, Mich., the bells of Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church toll as Head Start teacher Beryl Davis, 63, helps her class calm for breakfast.
Written on the wall in colorful stencil: The Future of the World is in This Room.
"I was born here," Davis says of Munising, a small town on Lake Superior. Like many of the program's teachers, she began as a low-income parent, sending her daughter to Head Start.
Davis has worked much of the past two decades in Head Start. She makes roughly $26 an hour and says turnover in her Munising classroom has been a persistent challenge.
"Every year I have to try to train a new person," Davis says of the aides in her room. "There have been a couple … that I haven't even bothered to train really." She says she can tell when "they're not going to stay."
Davis understands why they leave. She makes more than her aides and still has to supplement her Head Start income by working a second job. "Sometimes two second jobs," she laughs.
The 63-year-old waitresses at the local golf course during the summer and at a steakhouse outside of town, where she was scheduled for a shift the following Saturday.
A new teacher says, "I can't help [children] if I can't take care of myself"
To the west, in Marquette, Savannah Klapec, 27, is Davis' opposite: She's in her very first year as a lead classroom teacher, with no children of her own and no real history with Head Start.
Klapec began working for Head Start just last year, as a teacher assistant, after previously working in several other, non-Head Start classrooms, child care and day care settings.
Like Davis, she has an easy way with the children, floating from child to child during free play, happily dropping to her knees to help diaper a doll or advise on a marker color.
Klapec says she came to Head Start hoping for a little more stability, including better pay. She makes roughly the same as Davis, but tells NPR that her income doesn't go far.
"I am a single woman. I split my rent. So between rent, food, bills, car, gas, I'm just making it," Klapec says. Without a roommate, "I would be really scraping pennies to get by."
She admits that last year, as an assistant, she too took a second job at a local coffee shop.
When asked if she would consider taking a higher-paying job at the local public school, Klapec says, "I can't help [children] if I can't take care of myself."
Klapec spoke with NPR in early October. She has since left her job at Head Start.
A Head Start leader felt physically sick eliminating slots
When the pandemic briefly compelled many families to keep their children home, local Head Start directors in Michigan and elsewhere saw a rare opportunity to address the pay crisis.
Corey Holcomb oversees the Head Start programs across a swath of Michigan's rural Upper Peninsula. During the pandemic, she found herself with unused child slots and decided to cut them, using that money to increase wages by roughly 20% — a huge improvement.
"This year, we had five lead teacher openings, and we were able to fill all of them," Holcomb says. That's the good news.
Now the bad news: This new requirement from the Biden administration would force her to raise wages further. As much as Holcomb says she would like to do that, she's not sure how she would pay for it. Demand is back up. Cutting slots now would mean denying children services.
"It's hard to say, 'Which center doesn't need our programing? Which town is least in poverty?' " Holcomb says. "It's kind of like The Hunger Games, you know, who's going to be pulled out?"
Sarah See runs the Head Start program in Pullman where Julie Beck teaches, and says she understands the spirit of the new requirement and why it was necessary.
"I think it's incredible because I do think it would allow for some additional recruitment. Because now we would be paying [teachers] somewhat near what they're worth."
But See estimates she may have to raise pay by as much as $10,000 per person. And, like Holcomb, she's worried how she'll do that without extra funding from Congress.
"Not having designated funds to carry out that new rule would cause us to have to lower the amount of kids that we serve," See says.
Like Holcomb, See has already raised her teacher wages, cutting 40 slots for children. She says that decision made her physically sick, even as the pandemic had driven down demand.
Now, though, demand is back, and See says more cuts would be devastating.
Plenty of children, not enough teachers
The stakes could not be higher for thousands of children and families.
Research shows poverty can create early achievement gaps that can last a lifetime. But research also shows high-quality preschool can help prevent and close those gaps.
Head Start is an engine of opportunity, serving nearly 40 million mostly low-income children since its inception. But that engine is only as strong as its teaching corps, and today Head Start pay is so low, the program often loses teachers to better-paying preschool or public school jobs.
"We don't blame our staff for leaving," says Tommy Sheridan, the deputy director at the National Head Start Association.
Sheridan says Head Start directors often tell him stories of "staff coming into their office crying, saying, 'I don't want to leave Head Start, but I can make 20 grand more just by walking across the street or down the hall.' It is obscene. Every corner of the country, we hear this constantly."
And this staffing crisis has already forced many programs to close classrooms.
While Head Start is currently funded to serve 750,000 children, according to the Biden administration it is actually serving 650,000, in part because of staffing shortages.
Just ask MaDonna Princer. She oversees the Head Start programs in Grand Rapids and says that in her urban program, finding teachers has been "extremely difficult."
"You have a waitlist of 1,000 children, right? But you can't open the classrooms because you can't find staff that are qualified," Princer says. Adding to the challenge is the fact that Congress raised its expectations for teacher qualifications without a commensurate hike in pay.
At the beginning of the last school year, Princer says she had 43 staff vacancies, meaning over 20 classrooms remained closed because she couldn't adequately staff them.
"It's not a matter of not having the kids," she says. "It was a matter of not having the staff."
To keep the rest of her centers running smoothly, Princer and her leadership team declared "all hands on deck," abandoning their offices to work two days a week in classrooms.
Cutting child slots may be the only way forward
A few years ago, the Biden administration tried, but failed, to push a Head Start wage increase through Congress. Now, with its new rule and an increasing sense of urgency, the administration has decided to move forward, even without a funding commitment from lawmakers.
The rule suggests program directors can increase wages by eliminating the child slots that aren't being used due to a lack of staffing. It's a crisis with tragic circularity:
To serve more children, Head Start must hire more teachers. But to do that, wages must be higher, which requires serving fewer children.
The rule calls these cuts a "balance" between the urgent need for higher wages and the "potential impacts" the rule could have on the number of children Head Start serves.
The Biden administration's Katie Hamm tells NPR that "if Congress provides no additional funding," Head Start will continue to serve roughly 650,000 children, because it anticipates most of the program cuts would be to currently vacant slots.
Multiple local Head Start leaders, including Holcomb, tell NPR that their communities have already scaled back their services to raise pay, and to do more would cut too deep.
To raise pay "without further funding," Holcomb says, "would mean I have to close currently operating classrooms, cutting services to children and reducing staff."
Hamm doesn't dismiss those worries but points out that the requirements don't have to be met until August of 2031. "We intentionally gave a seven-year ramp-up to give Congress time to fund Head Start and to give programs time to plan and to seek funding."
Back on the playground in Pullman, where Julie Beck and Norma Silva have chosen to stay in spite of the low pay, the pair consider why they've stuck around as long as they have.
"The kids bring me joy," says Silva, who makes roughly $16 an hour after working in the program for nearly 24 years.
"I'm trying not to get teared up," Beck says, thinking of her son. When he reenlisted in the Marines, she says, he got a generous signing bonus. One he shared with her.
"My son paid for my house, so that's why I can make it as a [Head Start] teacher."
Edited by Nicole Cohen. Audio story produced by Janet Woojeong Lee.
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