What Is Head Start?

The term Head Start could be used as a shortened form of name, National Head Start Association, “a private, not-for-profit membership organization dedicated exclusively to meeting the needs of Head Start children and their families.” However, Head Start originally referred to the program created to “promote the school readiness of low-income children by enhancing their cognitive, social, and emotional development.”

This federal law had objectives of helping children “in a learning environment that supports children’s growth in language, literacy, mathematics, science, social and emotional functioning, creative arts, physical skills, and approaches to learning; and through the provision to low-income children and their families of health, educational, nutritional, social, and other services that are determined, based on family needs assessments, to be necessary.”

This nationwide program began in the 1960s as part of the War on Poverty program initiated under the Johnson administration. As this program was being designed specialists in the field of childcare and education helped develop the plans for children’s programs. The name Head Start was picked because the designers felt it portrayed the gap that existed between poor students and middle class and upper class students from the beginning of their school years.

At the time the program was set up under the Office of Economic Opportunity, but over the years the supervising agencies have changed so that the program is now under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Administration of Children and Families. Not long after the program started it was serving hundreds of thousands of children. In the summer of 1965 more than 500,000 children took part in a summer program for those entering school in the fall. Head Start provided medical and dental services in addition to preschool classes.

Some changes were made under the Nixon Administration, when the program was transferred from the Office of Economic Opportunity to the Office of Child Development. Further adjustments were made in the late 1970s, under the administration of President Jimmy Carter. Head Start began to expand to take in students who did not have English as a first language. These bilingual and multi-cultural programs covered nearly two dozen states in the early years. Twenty years after it was founded the Head Start program had a budget that exceeded a billion dollars. The number of children served had grown from a few thousand to more than one million.

The program further expanded under the Clinton administration with the introduction of early Head Start. Eventually the program became full-day and full-year plans. The total number of children who have been served in the program’s 45 year history has climbed to 22 million. The budget for this massive program now exceeds $6 billion, in part because it expanded to serve children as young as three years old and younger. In all, more than 1,600 different programs of education, training, nutrition and health are offered to Head Start children, using thousands of classrooms and meeting sites around the country. With a staff of more than 200,000, Head Start still needs thousands of volunteers to make the program work.

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