This story was originally published in the Alaska Beacon.
Only one of four Early Head Start classrooms is likely to be open in Nome next year because it is so difficult to retain qualified staff. It is only the latest reduction in the early childhood program that provides child care, early education and health and dental services to more than 3,000 children in families with low incomes.
Deb Trowbridge, the Head Start program director in Nome, has been able to keep two classrooms open over the last year by offering up to $500 a day to emergency substitute teachers with college degrees, but she said the organization cannot offer that premium forever.
“It’s not a sustainable model, so we’re looking at ending that really soon,” she said. “But while we transition to not paying that much to our subs, we’re looking at how we can pay our teaching staff more, just adjusting how we pay just so that we can retain staff.”
That effort will be buoyed by an influx of state dollars to the Head Start program after years of stagnant baseline funding.
Providers have been dogged in recent years by diminishing state funding that leaves them poorly equipped to retain qualified staff. The federal government pays for 80% of Head Start costs and the state used to contribute the remaining 20%, but Alaska’s contribution has dropped by about half in recent years. Legislators voted to reinstate the full match this year, but Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed half that increase. But he allowed more funding this year than last, when he vetoed most of the funding.
Program operators say it’s still a permanent boost to state funding for the early childhood education program that has seen its baseline funding dwindle. Statewide, the consensus is the increase will go to wages.
Trowbridge expressed mixed feelings about the increase. She said she was really happy to see funding go up, but she’s worried about the long-term sustainability of a program she sees as vital to her community.
“If we can’t get the staffing to operate our programs, if we can’t bring people in and pay them enough and make it so that it’s a livable wage for them, it’s just going to kind of collapse on itself,” she said.
The lowest paid staff member at her Nome site makes more than $27 an hour, but that’s not competitive with the region’s high wages. Urban centers usually pay somewhere in the range of $14-16 an hour, which urban operators say is only barely competitive with working at Target or for a fast food chain.
Rep. Justin Ruffridge, R-Soldotna and co-chair of the House Education Committee, said he often sees programs get started on grant funding or one-time funding and then flounder.
“I think it’s a perfect little microcosm of some of the issues that I see in my own district,” he said. “What people are really asking for is stability.”
Anne Shade, director of Head Start for Bristol Bay Native Association, said the stability of the funding allows programs like hers to increase staff salaries. She oversees Head Start programs for a region the size of Ohio. When programs lose staff, they have to reduce the number of children they can serve, also known as the number of open “slots.” Programs have been giving up slots even though they have long wait lists. One Head Start program in Wasilla, CCS Early Learning, gave up 95 slots – and the federal funding that comes with them – due to staffing woes over the last year.
“This will help a lot, and we’re hoping that it stabilizes the slots that everybody was able to keep,” Shade said. “But it won’t be able to add in those lost slots, those are probably gone.”
Lost slots also mean less federal funding. Because Head Start gets most of its funding from the federal government, the programs dramatically reduce the cost of child care to communities, program directors say. But the program gets less federal money when there are fewer children to support. If Head Start programs cannot keep teachers, they must serve fewer students and sacrifice that money.
Last year, the program brought in roughly $62 million for child care in Alaska. The state contributed $8.3 million. The state’s 17 Head Start programs had to find the remaining roughly $7 million. Shade said their part of the match usually comes from an “in kind” match where people volunteer their hours.
Sen. Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage, said the $2.6 million veto comes at a high cost. “We know that the biggest bang for our buck when it comes to improving education outcomes is investing in high quality early learning,” she said. “The dollars for Head Start and Parents as Teachers were a significant investment in that truism.”
Parents as Teachers, another early childhood education program with a focus on home visits, also saw its funding cut by more than $200,000 in the governor’s vetoes this year.
Rep. Julie Coulombe, R-Anchorage and a member of the Governor’s Child Care Task Force, said she was a little disappointed in the Head Start veto, but “overall, I thought there was a lot more that wasn’t vetoed than vetoed.”
She called the year a “big win” and said she sees a lot in the budget for child care and early education. Legislators approved her child care bill in May, which awaits Dunleavy’s signature as part of a larger bill, along with $7.5 million for grants for child care centers, for which she advocated as part of the House Finance Committee.
“You can’t get everything, but I was really thankful that the child care money was still there,” she said.
Claire Stremple is a reporter based in Juneau, Alaska. She got her start in public radio, first at KHNS in Haines and then on the health and environment beat at KTOO in Juneau. Her focus for the Beacon is education and criminal and social justice.
