Three-year-olds in prekindergarten at Abate Elementary School in Niagara Falls spent their days earlier this year much like many kids their age in preschool programs.
They played dress-up as cops and firefighters. They learned the letters of the alphabet. They scooped up bubbles at the water table. They asked for hugs.
Now the Niagara Falls School District wants to expand its pre-K program by taking over the federal government’s Head Start program in Niagara County this fall.
The Community Action Organization of Western New York has had the $4 million Head Start contract in Niagara County for nearly five years, but it was not automatically renewed because the nonprofit allowed a 3-year-old to wander away from a Head Start site unaccompanied onto a city street.
If the federal Administration for Children and Families awards the Head Start contract to the Niagara Falls School District, it would become just the fourth district in the state to operate a Head Start program, joining Ithaca, Geneva and the Westchester County district of Greenburgh. Federal officials say they expect to announce their Niagara County decision this summer.
Niagara Falls Superintendent Mark Laurrie said the school district’s pre-K program is already a success that he wants to expand.
Schools have been closed since mid-March because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Pre-K classes will resume in person once schools reopen. In the meantime, the district has been sending home picture books and other materials to parents.
Laurrie says that by the time they are in second grade, kids who attended the pre-K for 3-year-olds at Abate and other Niagara Falls schools have made more progress in reading compared with their peers in the district.
If the school district wins the Head Start contract, it would increase the number of 3- and 4-year-olds it educates, as well as work with pregnant women and infants as young as 6 weeks old.
“It’s always been my goal to start working with families from the time children are born, right from the hospital,” he said. “I could see a seamless continuum from birth all the way through.”
If the district is awarded the grant, it would not be the first time it's been among districts at the forefront of early childhood education. It has been among the roughly 7% of school districts in New York to expand its state-funded pre-K program to include 3-year-olds over the past few years. Its program has grown from 40 3-year-olds four years ago to 260 this year. The district also educates more than 400 4-year-olds in pre-K.
Head Start is a federal early childhood program for 3- and 4-year-olds that was started in 1965 as part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty. Three decades later, Early Head Start was launched under the same umbrella to serve pregnant women, infants and toddlers.
Although it serves children the same age as those in school pre-K programs, Head Start differs in that it is intended to address more than just the educational needs of children in poverty, including dental care, counseling and vision and hearing screenings.
Most of the 285 Head Start and Early Head Start programs in New York are run by nonprofits like the Community Action Organization, which also runs the Head Start program in Erie County.
“There isn't one right answer to what type of organization is best suited to operate Head Start,” said Robin Winchell, a spokesperson for the National Head Start Association. “It's different in every community, and changes over time based on the evolving needs of the community.”
Pre-K teacher Trish Hennegan works with student Ziah Cessna during class at the Harry F. Abate Elementary School in Niagara Falls. (Mark Mulville/Buffalo News)
CAO has Head Start grant
The CAO has operated the Head Start program in Erie County for 54 years and now serves more than 2,000 children there.
Under the leadership of CEO L. Nathan Hare, the CAO took over operation of the Head Start program in Niagara County five years ago. It receives $1.9 million a year to educate 200 preschool children and $2.1 million to serve 140 pregnant women, infants and toddlers in Niagara County.
Last year, the federal government decided that it would not automatically renew the CAO’s Head Start grant in Niagara County, citing an incident three years ago when a child slipped out of the DiFrancesco Academy and was found out in the street.
The CAO declined to comment when asked by The Buffalo News why it believes it is the best entity to run the program in Niagara County for the next five years. It also declined to comment when asked how the Head Start and Early Head Start programs in Niagara County have improved the services to children and families since the CAO took over operations.
In Erie County, the federal government decided last year that it would not automatically renew the CAO’s $24.2 million Head Start grant, which expires in February 2021. That decision results from the program scoring among the lowest 10 percent of Head Start programs ranked by federal reviewers during site visits in 2018.
Kids abused, left unsupervised in Head Start centers run by nonprofit
Differences between pre-K and Head Start
While the pre-K program in Niagara Falls schools looks similar to many preschool programs, there are significant differences between it and the CAO’s Head Start program.
Children in the pre-K benefit from many of the services of the schools they are in. At Abate, for instance, half of the year, the school’s art teacher works with the 3-year-olds twice a week. The other half of the year, the music teacher does.
Beyond that, there are differences between the teaching staffs. The prekindergarten teachers in Niagara Falls are certified teachers with a master’s degree, and many have years of experience teaching. Trish Hennegan, for instance, taught academically accelerated sixth-graders before becoming one of the district’s first teachers in the pre-K program.
One out of four teachers in the CAO’s Niagara County Head Start program, on the other hand, have only 30 hours of training in early education, according to federal data available online. Another one out of four have an associate’s degree. And one out of four have a master’s degree.
Teachers in the two programs have disparate salaries.
Many veteran teachers in Niagara Falls make more than $100,000 a year – which is three to four times as much as teachers in the CAO’s Head Start program.
Those teachers are worth the money, Laurrie says.
While the activities in the pre-K classrooms look commonplace, teachers carefully tie them into learning objectives. For instance, when fresh fruit is delivered to the classroom every morning and children sit down to eat, it’s more than just snack time.
“We talk about the color of the fruit, the shape of the fruit,” said Andrea Ciccone, who teaches 3-year-olds at Abate. “We teach them how to peel the fruit, so it even works on fine motor skills.”
Although Laurrie said the district would pay Head Start teachers more than the CAO does, he said it would compensate partly through savings in administrative costs.
“I wouldn’t need to hire a food service director. I have one,” he said. “I wouldn’t need a maintenance director. I have one.”
Nisa Ruffin works with some triangle-shaped magnets during pre-K class at the Harry F. Abate Elementary School in Niagara Falls on March 12, 2020. (Mark Mulville/Buffalo News)
Starting young
The key to helping children out of poverty is to provide services from the time they are infants, Laurrie believes. And the best way to do that, he says, is in a way that maximizes continuity and communication.
If the school district is selected to run Niagara County’s Head Start program, he said, two things would happen.
First, the Head Start classes for 3- and 4-year-olds would be brought under the umbrella of the district’s existing pre-K program. That means the curriculum and instruction would become uniform for all Niagara Falls children in either program, and it means that the Head Start teachers would have a direct line of communication with kindergarten teachers.
And as much money as possible would be spent on Early Head Start slots for infants, toddlers and pregnant women.
“I’m going to work backwards and say, ‘How many 2-year-old classes can I open up? How many 1-year-old classes can I open up?’” Laurrie said. “If I’m going to crack the 77% graduation rate, we have to do something different.”
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