Head Starts and hard truths

The federal fallout of childcare ... Arizona is the center of the MAGAverse ... And let's just mute that thread.

It’s been a chaotic year for Arizona’s Head Start providers.

The federal program, which provides childcare for low-income families, was an unintended victim of President Donald Trump’s federal funding freezes, and Head Start programs across the country couldn’t access the funding they were already awarded.

Then the Trump administration's draft budget leaked, revealing plans to eliminate Head Start entirely and take away childcare from more than half a million families who depend on the 60-year-old program.

An updated budget released earlier this month suggested Trump won’t kill Head Start after all — but he’s already done foundational damage to it.

Meanwhile, Arizona is in the middle of a childcare crisis.

More than 4,500 children are on a waitlist for state-issued subsidized childcare, for example, and that number will only get higher unless state lawmakers decide to hand over funding in an economically tumultuous time.

The federal Head Start program provides some relief to low-income families who can’t access state-issued care. But it, too, is at risk.

A group of two-year-old Head Start students started their day with cereal and pineapple at the Urban Strategies Early Head Start program.

Head Start programs are embedded in school districts and community centers throughout the state. Generally, families that are homeless and have kids ages 5 and under qualify, as do kids in foster care or families that receive other federal assistance like Supplemental Security Income. So do families at or below the federal poverty level, which is only $32,150 for a family of four.

More than 17,000 children are enrolled in Head Start across about 500 Arizona locations. And it fills a considerable gap in the lack of affordable childcare here — especially in rural areas and on tribal lands.

But it’s not up to our state lawmakers to keep the program running. Even worse, it’s up to the Trump administration and Congress.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced a “dramatic restructuring” in March that shut down five regional Head Start offices, including the regional office that Arizona’s providers relied on to administer the program. Those regional offices provide technical assistance, training, and most importantly, funding for individual programs.

Arizona’s Head Start providers have instead been looped into a larger “south region” for administrative help. Right now, there’s still no one to call to answer questions.

Jessica Rivera-García, the executive director of the Arizona Head Start Association, hasn’t received answers from the federal government about who she should call for questions instead.

“It was very devastating. (The regional office) offered all the support our programs have, they're the ones who approve grants,” she said. “If a program has a question about something that happens, they're the first person that they pick up the phone and call.”

Shandeen Gomez, who runs the Urban Strategies Early Head Start program in South Phoenix, said providers are being told to email their questions to the federal Head Start office, but only to document the communication. Not to get an answer.

Receiving federal funds that Head Start programs use to take care of kids and pay their staff has been the biggest problem. Before, it was standard to get requested funds within 24 hours. Now, those fund transfers can take three days.

“With that funding freeze and delays and not having anybody to reach out to, it’s just, like, crickets. You don't hear anything. And then fear sets in, like, are we going to have the funds?” Gomez said. “It's like a ripple effect of delays that really impact operations.”

On her tour of Urban Strategies, Nicole got to read “Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes” to a group of Head Start students. If you’re interested, Pete steps in a pile of strawberries and discovers his love for red shoes, too.

Beyond the drop off

Head Start programs are not just places where parents can drop their kids off for the day.

They’re like daycare on steroids.

Head Start offers health, hearing and vision screenings, and provides up to three meals a day to every kid enrolled in the program. At Gomez’s Urban Strategies Early Head Start center, there's an on-site food pantry, breastfeeding room and an office space where parents can use a computer.

Parents escort their kids to their classrooms, sign them in for the day and can use a changing center at the back of the room with the diapers and formula the center provides.

As one parent signed in on Wednesday morning, a teacher showed her child a stack of flashcards with the child’s face expressing various emotions.

“Are you feeling angry today? Sad?” the teacher asked.

The two-year-old saw her own smiling face pasted on the last card, and nodded in recognition that she’s feeling happy today.

Kassandra Celaya enrolled her two-year-old son Oscar at the Head Start center when she started noticing his behavioral issues. In the two years he has attended the program, Oscar has developed his speech, and he’s ahead of the curve in potty training.

When Oscar goes to wash his hands, he uses a paper towel, folds it in half to shut off the faucet and throws it away by using his foot to open the trash can. He also got a fresh set of tubes in his ears that help him hear after his teachers noticed he was off-balance.

“It's crazy, because people just say, ‘Oh, you just drop them off.’ No, it's not just a drop off. It's like, if you need anything … they get involved,” Celaya said. “Where we're located, (people) need a lot of help with resources and all that. We find it here.”

Oscar was excited to show his mom, Kassandra Celaya, his Peppa Pig toy in his Head Start classroom.

Fighting the federal narrative

Although Trump’s second draft budget funds Head Start, it could still fall victim to the federal downsizing movement. Head Start has yearly base funding, but each provider depends on grants and cost-of-living adjustments to maintain and enhance operations.

That extra funding isn’t guaranteed in an administration that has already slashed costs for things like National Institutes of Health research and infectious disease management.

But in the first Trump budget that proposed eliminating Head Start, the administration didn’t cite cost savings for getting rid of the program.

Instead, it cites the Trump administration’s “goals of returning control of education to the states and increasing parental control.”

García, the state’s Head Start Association director, emphasizes the program is all about parental control.

Each parent has a family advocate, and Celaya vice-chairs a policy council at Urban Strategies, where parents get a direct say in the center’s policies and overview of who they hire.

And as for the local control narrative, every Head Start program has to do a comprehensive community assessment to make sure they're meeting the needs of the area they serve, she said.

But we’re not exactly living in a time of logic-informed policy.

Congress has to approve a federal budget by October 1. That could erode a lot of programs Arizona relies on, but parents like Celaya are counting on Head Start being spared.

“If Head Start goes away, the parents are gonna lose a lot,” she said. “Kids are gonna lose a lot.”

All roads lead to Arizona: As fringe legal theorists attempt to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court that the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship only applies to former slaves, there is, of course, an Arizona angle. The fringe legal theorist at the forefront of the fight is John Eastman, the Trump campaign strategist who orchestrated the attempt to steal the 2020 election and was charged with multiple felonies in Arizona, though his case lingers, the New York Times writes. Meanwhile, Congress took a step closer to passing a national school voucher law similar to Arizona’s School Tuition Organization program, where donors can reduce their tax burden by giving to organizations that provide private and religious school vouchers, NPR reports. It would cost $5 billion per year.

Ethically challenged: Fountain Hills Councilman Allen Skillicorn was charged in a hit-and-run accident, the Republic’s Lauren De Young reports. It’s not the first time he’s been in trouble since winning a spot on the council in 2022. Last year, an outside law firm found he violated several city ethics policies, including by aggressively following a city code enforcement officer who had removed his campaign signs because they violated city code.

"Allen refuses to take responsibility for Allen's actions," rival Councilmember Brenda Kalivianakis told De Young. "So, the fact that he would flee an accident scene fits right in line with other things I've noticed about his character."

Donations get results: Gov. Katie Hobbs signed a bill shielding utilities from liability if their equipment starts wildfires, provided they have a plan to deal with it, the Republic’s Mary Jo Pitzl writes. APS, a major donor to Hobbs’ secret legal slush fund, lobbied for the bill. Meanwhile, the Greer Fire, which may or may not have been started by a utility transformer explosion, is still raging, KTAR reports. The fire doubled in size yesterday and stood at about 7,000 acres as of the latest reporting.

We are still accepting donations to our news slush fund. Become a major influence peddler today!

Donations get results part 2: Hobbs also signed another bill that APS wrote and lobbied for that allows utilities to sell off debt as bonds. Environmentalists, Democratic lawmakers and Attorney General Kris Mayes all urged her not to sign it and warned it’s probably unconstitutional, per the Capitol Times’ Reagan Priest.

No, you’re a nuisance: Thirsty farmers and cities are attempting to block Mayes’ efforts to rein in the Saudi Arabian alfalfa farming conglomerate, Fondomonte, saying if Mayes wins her “public nuisance” claim against the farm, there’s no telling what she’ll use the precedent for next, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. Opponents argue she’s targeting the company and leaning on the public nuisance angle because the company is not actually breaking any water laws.

Mark your calendars: Democrats vying to replace the late Raúl Grijalva in Southern Arizona’s Congressional District 7 will face off in a debate on June 10, the Tucson Sentinel’s Jim Nintzel reports. The primary is July 15. The debate will stream on the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections’ Youtube page and local media stations.

Pop some tags: The thrifting industry is experiencing a “golden era,” the Wall Street Journal reports, thanks to tariffs and hipsters. Arizona-based Buffalo Exchange is seeing revenues tick up, and Phoenix’s Delivering Dreams of Arizona is building a new store that’s twice as large as the current one.

“I’ve been in this industry for 33 years, and I’ve never seen growth this fast,” Shannon Erickson, director of resale at Delivering Dreams, told the Journal. “It’s not just old ladies anymore.”

There’s nothing more anxiety-inducing than logging into Twitter and finding you have a bunch of notifications.

Except perhaps realizing that the notifications are all from MAGA accounts.

And they’re praising you.

Yes, MAGA Twitter¹ loved our write-up yesterday of Howie Fischer’s exposé about Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ secret slush fund.

No, we don’t feel great about getting likes from repliers who called for her execution.

If you found us via Twitter yesterday, please direct all angry DMs about how this publication isn’t what you expected to our Director of MAGA Outreach, Dan Coulson.

1. Yeah, we realize “MAGA Twitter” is redundant.