Lauderdale County Head Start is an Early Education Program, operated by Community Action Partnership of North Alabama. www.capna.org
⚡️What are the components of a Head Start program?
💥Head Start takes a comprehensive approach to meeting the needs of young children. There are four major components to Head Start:
☀️Education: Providing a variety of learning experiences to help children grow intellectually, socially, and emotionally.
☀️Health: Providing health services such as immunizations, dental, medical, and mental health, and nutritional services, and early identification of health problems.
☀️Parent Involvement: Involving parents in the planning and implementation of activities. Parents serve on policy councils and committees that make administrative decisions; participate in classes and workshops on child development; and volunteer in the program.
☀️Social Services: Provide outreach to families to determine what services they need.
💥A National Commitment
☀️Head Start is a federal early childhood education program that promotes the school readiness of children from low-income families, prenatal to age five, by enhancing their cognitive, social and emotional development. It is the national commitment to give every child, regardless of circumstances at birth, an opportunity to succeed in school and in life. In the nearly six decades since its inception, Head Start and Early Head Start have improved the lives of more than 37 million children and their families.
☀️Head Start alumni are in all walks of the nation’s life. Educators, doctors, lawyers, military personnel, artists, engineers, religious and civic leaders, and scientists—from all across the country—remember Head Start as the place where, at an early age, they acquired a life-long love of learning.
☀️In addition to life and school preparedness, Head Start is also the nation’s laboratory for early childhood education and learning innovation. Head Start offers a unique whole child/whole family program design coupled with a delivery system that includes local programs, national standards, monitoring, professional development, and family engagement. This has been the basis for many subsequent statewide and community initiatives.
☀️When Head Start was first launched in 1965, the idea of providing comprehensive health, nutrition, and education services to children in poverty was revolutionary, if not radical. The Head Start Model, developed over the decades has been built on evidence-based practices and is constantly adapting—using the best available science and teaching techniques to meet the needs of local communities.
💥The Whole Child
☀️Head Start programs offer an ideal laboratory for the study of effective child development and learning. The Department of Health and Human Services funds extensive research every year that reinvigorates practices, ensuring that programs meet children's needs by creating a deep understanding of how they learn and what supports healthy development. Children enter Head Start with serious socioeconomic disadvantages that can hold them back for life.
💥The Whole Family
☀️Head Start supports families facing difficult circumstances and seeks to mitigate obstacles to learning in the early years.
❤️What makes the whole child and whole family model so powerful? Nobel-prize winning economist James Heckman has suggested that the social-emotional development cultivated by programs may be the true contributor to long-term impacts, and health benefits which range from decreased child mortality to adult health behaviors. Furthermore, an additional motivator behind children's success through elementary school and beyond are very likely parents. By helping families who are struggling with poverty and other socio-economic challenges achieve their goals for education, employment, and housing, Head Start plays a transformative role across two generations.
