The Importance of Head Start in a Small Community
Since the program’s creation in 1965, Head Start and Early Head Start has directly helped over 32 million children. Former Director of the Office of Head Start, Yvette Sanchez Fuentes, said “Head Start staff across the country provide a consistent, caring, and stimulating environment to meet the educational and developmental needs of a million Head Start children.”
“Every Head Start classroom across the nation is filled with children with incredible promise.” - Yvette Sanchez Fuentes.
Today, the program’s reach is endless. Teachers across the country help over one million children every single day, children who benefit from Head Start and Early Head Start’s expansive services.
Teachers and faculty work in cohesion with parents. It is essential to a child’s mental, emotional and physical development that the teachers learn how the student functions and adapts to new environments. This can include everything for knowing the reading, writing or speaking level of a student before they enroll to knowing what foods a child likes and what foods they do not like.
An article supported by the Office of Disease Prevention and Heath Promotion (ODPHP), states that important mental, emotional and physical skills — emotional regulation and attachment, language development, cognitive development, motor skills — can be “significantly delayed when young children experience inadequate caregiving, environmental stressors, and other negative risk factors. These stressors and factors can affect the brain and may seriously compromise a child’s physical, social-emotional, and cognitive growth and development.”
The first step many teachers take when caring for students is decorating their classroom in ways that provide a sense of familiarity to the children. Teachers at Northside Head Start, located in St. Joseph, Miss., are apt to decorate their rooms, choosing themes appropriate for the ages they teach. Some decorate their room with photos of superheroes while others use Disney and Pixar characters to spruce up the otherwise bare walls.
Northside Head Start Center Manager Tracy Curtis Hurt explains how room decorations can help new students acclimate to new environments.
“It engages them and helps them feel at ease,” Curtis-Hurt said. “They see a familiar emblem — like Batman or Mickey Mouse — they can identify with, and it makes it easier for some that may be a little agitated.”
Other Head Starts began their journey decorating elsewhere. Plattsburg Head Start in Plattsburg, Miss., began their spring with a building makeover. Volunteers — teachers, faculty, parents, students, and community members — spent their Friday sprucing up the site.
Other children need a more personal item that reminds them of home. Many children attending Head Start speak languages besides English. Whether said students are bilingual, multilingual, or monolingual in a language other than English, they attend a facility with English speaking teachers. For some students that speak another language, attending Head Start is their first place they regularly visit where English is spoken.
“Some of the kids that are homesick have little lanyards, and they put family pictures or their language,” Curtis-Hurt said. “They wear those throughout the day, so they can look at it. That’s what their comfort thing is.”
Head Start is a representation of the community. Eight Head Starts and Early Head Starts are operated under Community Action Partnership of Greater St. Joseph, including North Side Head Start and Plattsburg Head Start.
Different facilities have different enrollments. Some have around 15–30 students in one or two classrooms and some have upwards of 70 students in 5–6 different classrooms. Visit the Google Map below for a complete list of facilities under Community Action Partnership of Greater St. Joseph.
Visit Pinterest for more information about Head Start and Early Head Start.
