Head Start short spots

CAPITAL REGION — Only half of the children who sign up for Head Start in Schenectady County actually get into the program each year, which has such a long waiting list that some children enter kindergarten before they can get a preschool spot.

“The real key, in the early spring, is to apply early,” said Schenectady Head Start director Keith Houghton. “That’s the best chance.”

Every year, more than 500 low-income parents apply to send their children to Schenectady Head Start, a free preschool program for 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds. The only trouble is that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services only funds 276 Head Start slots for Schenectady County, forcing it to place nearly half of the applicants on a waiting list.

Houghton says he has so much interest in Head Start every year that he could open a second school and still fill every slot. The need is “expressed constantly” to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, he said, but every year he ends up turning away more children than he accepts.

“HHS has a set amount that it allocates,” he said. “If an opportunity comes up for some special funding, which is very rare, we apply for it. We continue to look for a variety of funding. Even if you have a slight chance, you have to try. ... But funding is being reduced all the time.”

This November, 200 children were waiting. Houghton said 25 of them may get in at some point in the year. The rest will likely enter kindergarten without any preschool preparation.

That is a recipe for early failure, said Schenectady City Schools Superintendent Eric Ely.

“We find they have severe difficulties and fall behind very quickly if they aren’t in a program and their parents aren’t working with them, nobody’s reading to them,” he said. “Right now, what’s happening is we get a 4-year-old who is functioning at what might be a 2-year-old in the suburbs.”

He thinks preschool is especially critical for the low-income parents who qualify for Head Start. They typically have little education, work long hours and can’t afford to place their child in any structured learning environment before public school begins.

“To me, early childhood education is the critical piece,” Ely said. “I believe it’s critical to our eventual success and turning around the test scores we’re seeing. If they can get to first grade ahead or at least tied with their peers, we feel we can take them as far as the kids in the suburbs. But they start a couple years behind.”

Pre-K a factor

The situation is worse in Schenectady County than anywhere else in the Capital District, but some counties are seeing long waits for children who don’t have anywhere else to go. Montgomery County has 41 children waiting right now and 151 children enrolled in Head Start. There, half of the wait-listed children will enter the program before the end of the year, said Marianne Suchocki, director of Montgomery Head Start.

By contrast, in Albany County, there are actually vacancies.

The program for 4-year-olds has openings, said Neenah Bland, interim early childhood education director for Albany County Head Start. There is a waiting list for the 3-year-olds, but it’s tiny in comparison to Montgomery and Schenectady counties.

“Right now, no one has waited more than 30 days,” Bland said.

Albany has just as many slots per capita as Schenectady. It has funding for 469 children, about 3 percent of the Head Start-aged children in the county. Likewise, Schenectady County has funding for 3 percent of its Head Start-aged children.

In terms of poverty, the counties are similar — about 11 percent of Albany’s residents are in poverty, compared to 12 percent of Schenectady’s, according to census data.

The only difference between the two programs is that Houghton must split his resources between 3- and 4-year-olds, while Bland is able to concentrate most of hers on programs for 3-year-olds. That’s because in Albany County, many 4-year-olds can go to preschool in the public schools, Bland said: “Most schools offer pre-K now.”

That’s not the case in Schenectady County, where some school districts are still debating whether to offer full-day kindergarten, much less pre-school.

Persistent problem

But in the city, where the vast majority of the Head Start applicants live, every elementary school offers full-day kindergarten. Last year, the district also opened an early childhood education center with pre-K slots for 126 children.

In addition, the Keane, King and Woodlawn elementary schools offer pre-K, with about 18 students enrolled this year in each school.

All of that is not enough. Schenectady Head Start got just as many applications this year as it did before those pre-K programs opened. In fact, the situation is even worse than the waitlist reveals. Houghton said many parents don’t apply once he tells them that they will be at the bottom of a list of 200.

“You have to be honest with them,” he said.

Houghton thinks the high demand for Head Start indicates that many impoverished parents can’t afford private preschool and can’t find a free school. They can’t apply to Head Start unless they qualify as low-income.

“Maybe there are fewer other alternatives, fewer places for 3- and 4-year-olds to go to get services,” he said, noting that he doesn’t do much recruiting yet still gets buried in applications. “It’s not like we’re beating the bushes for them.”

Lagging results

The program is well-known and popular, partly because former President Bill Clinton increased funding for Head Start. The agency was created in 1965 by an act of Congress and today has an annual budget of $6.9 billion. In New York state, Head Start spends an average of $7,983 per child.

But despite its popularity, children do not finish Head Start on par with their middle-class peers. A 2003 federal study of Head Start children found that they score well behind the average preschooler in vocabulary, early writing and early math. By the end of kindergarten, Head Start children still lagged behind their peers, scoring on average below the level their peers were at before starting kindergarten.

However, Head Start had a clear impact on vocabulary, allowing them to make up one-third of the gap in just one year of preschool. Gains were inconclusive on the other academic subjects, but researchers found that Head Start children were better prepared to learn than they had been a year earlier. They were more social and able to follow teachers’ instructions, follow rules and take turns, all critical skills for a school setting.

Head Start directors said they believe their program’s best facet is its work with parents, who are urged to read to their children and take advantage of childcare medical programs.

“They often seem to have had a bad experience in school,” said Houghton. “This goes a long way toward overcoming that and preparing them for their child’s positive experience and their role as a parent supporting a student.”