By Lee Rood, Des Moines Register
Advocates for the 60-year-old federal program want Iowans to take action
Part of a series.
Reading “The Very Busy Spider” to a circle of lively 4-year-olds crouched before her on a rug, teacher Crystal Crowdis builds in a lesson that promises to help her Head Start preschool class when they graduate next year to kindergarten.
Who, the veteran early childhood teacher asks, was the first character in the book the spider encountered as she was working so hard on her web?
“The horse!” the kids say.
Crowdis challenges the children to remember each of the following characters included in the nursery rhyme adaptation — a cow, a sheep — before breaking for a lunch of chicken nuggets, mini-waffles, mandarin orange slices and milk.
Mitchell Early Learning Center Principal Jessica Parsons, observing with a Register reporter and photographer, says educators know well the proven benefits of Head Start to children and their families.
Which is why losing the 60-year-old federal program would be so devastating. And not just for this classroom of mostly southside Des Moines youngsters.
“This definitely goes far past Mitchell,” Parsons said. “It would have a huge impact on the entire country.”
Teacher Crystal Crowdis high fives a student at Mitchell Early Learning Center on April 24, 2025, in Des Moines. Lily Smith/The RegisterRecent reports by a slew of major national media outlets that a draft of President Trump’s 2026 budget excludes any funding for Head Start and Early Head Start, its companion for very young children and expectant families, has left Iowa educators frustrated, worried and deeply disappointed.
Some are hoping, in spite of all the fiscal uncertainty in the nation’s capital and deep cuts to the federal budget from the Department of Government Efficiency, that ultimately won’t happen.
So far this year, the administration has withheld nearly $1 billion in funding across the country — closing some regional Head Start offices elsewhere across the country.
That slow-walked funding has included some $13 million meant for Iowa programs from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to Democrats in the U.S. Senate.
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Eliminating Head Start and Early Head Start completely would cut at least $12.5 billion from the $3.57 trillion current federal budget. But Iowa educators and advocates say it would have a direct and powerful impact on an estimated 800,000 children and families nationally, as well as employers and the U.S. economy as a whole.
At stake for Iowa in the budget decision is some $89 million that benefits poor kids and families — money that is spent in communities across the state on programming, services and wages.
In Iowa, 36 programs — half Head Start for 3- and 4-year-olds and half Early Head Start for younger tots — serve 7,500 children. Gone for about 5,000 parents would be not only a high-quality preschool option, but a wide array of services that affect whether parents can work, enroll in school or serve in the military.
About 2,300 Head Start workers statewide would lose their jobs. And many communities across Iowa would have no preschool or child care options to fill that void, advocates say.
“We understand (Trump’s) goal is to cut the deficit and trim the budget. But just slashing everything across the board will only create more devastation and more need,” said Lori Ferris, executive director of the Iowa Head Start Association. “The state does not have the capacity to serve those children. There’s no infrastructure in place to serve those families.”
Head Start provides not only early childhood education for children below the poverty level, but free medical, dental and vision screenings; healthy meals and nutrition resources; goal-setting and parenting support; as well as assistance for housing, educational resources and other priority needs.
“One of the things I love most about Head Start is that it wraps around the family. It’s pretty incredible,” said Kristin Rourk, who oversees early childhood for Des Moines Public Schools.
Rourk called heartbreaking the idea of losing Head Start. But on a pragmatic level, she said, defunding the program would prevent some Americans from working.
“This would significantly impact the workforce,” she said. “Not just in Des Moines, but as a state and as a country.”
Popular — until now
Head Start was launched initially as an eight-week summer program in 1965 under President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” As more has been gleaned from early childhood research — which has shown that 90% of a child’s brain is developed by age 5 — it has expanded in its offerings to children and families.
Iowa’s state and federal leaders, no matter their politics, have largely been fans of early childhood education in general, and Head Start in particular.
While academics and policy think tanks have debated the program’s cognitive effects on children versus its cost, an exhaustive, years-long research released in 2021 — after tracking some 22 million Head Start kids — suggested it was overwhelming beneficial to their long-term success.
“Using only savings on public assistance expenditures and increases in tax revenue due to higher wage earnings, we find that the public internal rate of return of putting one child through Head Start ranges from 5.4 to 9.1 percent,” that research found. “… The bottom line is that America’s first national, public preschool program generated sizeable returns over the lifetimes of its first participants.”
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Cuts run counter to many Iowa leaders’ priorities
The same year that research was released, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds assembled some of the state’s heaviest hitters in business after the pandemic to brainstorm the best ways to improve the state’s lackluster economy. Their top recommendation: Improve the state’s early childhood education and child care options for working Iowans.
“Iowa is a national leader in the share of households with all parents working but has too few options for child care: 23 percent of Iowans — and nearly 35 percent of rural Iowans — live in a “child care desert,” the Governor’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board reported.
In her Condition of the State address this year, Reynolds pushed anew to expand previous preschool and child care initiatives even farther.
Last week, the Iowa Senate passed a bill prescribing new grants to fund all-day daycare to further Reynolds’ goals.
Republicans said the legislation, Senate File 445, will provide new preschool availability for families and make it easier for kids to get all-day care. Democrats said the bill simply moves money around and doesn’t provide real solutions to Iowa’s child-care shortage.
Advocates of Head Start say defunding Head Start in Iowa, which includes a mix of independent programs across the state, would be a huge setback. When children have good child care and preschool programs, their parents can work and pay taxes, strengthening families and communities, they say.
But Project 2025, the policy blueprint created by the conservative Heritage Foundation, called for eliminating Head Start altogether, saying the $11 billion program was “fraught with scandal and abuse.”
And the Trump administration has acted on many of its objectives, including attempting to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.
Some Republicans also have been emphasizing the program’s shortcomings and criticizing efforts to increase funding.
Ferris said she doesn’t want to become too alarmed — she knows Head Start has many supporters in Congress — but her organization has been encouraging Iowans to do everything they can to reach out to the Iowa’s congressional delegation. The National Head Start Foundation also has a national call to action for supporters to get involved.
Bottom line, Ferris said: Dismantling a no-cost program that benefits children from birth to age 5 and their parents in a hard-working state like Iowa “would be catastrophic.”
It also would drive up costs for all child care at a time when there is high demand, high cost and limited availability, other advocates have said. And its elimination would be especially harmful for rural areas, where Head Start has served millions with the federal funding.
In the Des Moines Public Schools, nearly 420 students are enrolled in half-day and full-day Head Start programming. The district would lose around 42 full-time employees if those students and families were turned away.
Eliminating the larger Head Start grant that funds DMPS’s program, which is up for renewal this year at Drake University, would also impact an on-site program at Drake and those at six child-care locations, according to Lisa Proctor, director of the Drake Head Start and Early Head Start program.
The non-DMPS programs affect another 515 kids and 115 staff members.
“I feel strongly Head Start is a strong, well-established, well-evidenced program that has received considerable bipartisan support,” Proctor said. “I choose to believe that support still exists and the benefits of the program are just undeniable. At the same time, we’re not about to sit back and cross our fingers. We are committed to ensuring the benefits of this program is known and the benefits are understood.”
Bebi Manns, whose now 7-year-old son Ryan benefited from years of Head Start programming beginning when he was 2, said the experience was amazing for both of them.
“They were there to help me remember how to teach a child. It was a loving environment, very warm,” she said.
Manns, of in West Des Moines, said she also watched how the staff worked with a mix of kids for whom English was not their first language, filling in language gaps and getting them ready for school.
“Ryan, he just slid right into school,” she said. “He’d been in a classroom since he was 2.”
Manns said the threat to such a popular program is very upsetting, especially when she thinks about what it could do to dedicated educators who love their jobs but don’t make a lot of money.
“They have worked so hard to save these children and now they’re having to work so hard to save their jobs,” she said.
This story was updated to add a gallery.
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