In aftermath of funding freeze, fears linger at Head Start program

Over a month after President Donald Trump’s sudden federal funding freeze, Wisconsin Head Start administrators, staff and families are still reeling from the effects of temporarily reduced funding and are nervous about the future.

The Trump administration released a memo on Jan. 27 freezing all federal spending already authorized by Congress. After Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul and 22 other state attorneys general sued, the administration rescinded the memo but on Jan. 28 maintained its commitment to withholding federal funding. A federal judge in Rhode Island granted a temporary restraining order blocking the freeze on Jan. 31, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit upheld the order on Feb. 11.

The funding freeze came down on Tuesday of a payroll week for Western Dairyland Head Start, which operates several Head Start centers across western Wisconsin. The program’s director, Thanh Bui-Duquette, said the payment management system her organization uses to request reimbursement from the federal government went down that day, and even after the administration rescinded its memo, funds for her program continued to be delayed.

“I’ve been doing this for 13 years now. Historically, it’s very typical when we request a drawdown, we typically receive funds within one or two days. So when we request the amount, the fund typically is deposited to our bank account within one or two days,” she said. “In this instance, we actually did not receive our money until the following Wednesday, and that’s after multiple contact with the Office of Head Start, payment management system, our elected officials. And finally, we received our funds the following Wednesday. So we did have to use some discretionary funds because payroll was issued to staff that Friday.”

All in all, Western Dairyland had to use about $350,000 of its discretionary funds to make payroll. While it came out OK in the end, Bui-Duquette said that could have potentially put the organization in a very tight spot.

“We don’t have unlimited access to discretionary funds. We only have enough and so, if it had gotten a lot longer, we may need to make a difficult decision on, what do we need to do in terms of programming?” she said.

Bui-Duquette said she’s already having to plan the timing of fund requests a lot more carefully after this experience.

In addition to this, if Congress and the president don’t approve a budget deal by March 14, a federal government shutdown could cause a lot of hardship for families that rely on Head Start.

“These are low-income families,” Bui-Duquette said. “Truly in the majority of our counties, many of our locations, we are the only licensed child care provider in that community. You are talking about rural western Wisconsin. … These families have been counting on us for care so that the parents can get to work.”

Brenda Mateo, whose daughter was at Western Dairyland Head Start until last year and who now works as a family advocate for the program, understands all too well how important Head Start is for families.

“I started working [at Ashley Furniture] when I was 18 and I was a single mom, and then when my child turned 2 1/2, I came to the school and applied for her. And the reason why I did is because child care is just so expensive,” Mateo said.

She said Head Start is the reason she was able to attend college classes and pursue her dream of working in education.

“I only was paying for like six hours every week, instead of almost 50, and that cut the child care costs so I could afford college,” Mateo said.

The funding freeze, temporary as it was, scared Head Start families and employees alike, she said.

“There were families asking us, What is going to happen with Head Start? What are you guys’ plans?’” Mateo said. “And we didn’t really have any answers for them, because nobody had answers for us. It was kind of just like overnight thing. And not only did it just scare our families, it scared everybody here that works here. It scared myself. It scared my center director. It scared all the teachers. It was just a domino effect. We were all going to be hurt, and we provided transparency: We don’t really know what’s going to happen. We wish we had better answers, but basically just to write your representatives and to tell them why is Head Start important to you.”

Mateo can easily put herself in the shoes of families whose children are enrolled as they are faced with the prospect of losing access to Head Start, whether through a government shutdown or through permanent cuts in federal funding.

“It would have been so bad,” she said, imagining if she had had to face the elimination of Head Start as a parent. “I would have probably had to either quit my job or drop out of college, and I feel like that’s the case for a lot of parents, because they depend on us, and child care is just so expensive.”