A Home Visitor’s Mission: Continuing to Empower Families Amid Head Start Uncertainty

After nearly 30 years in early childhood education, the work supporting young children’s healthy growth and development still moves Cara Craig.

From a preschool across the street from Cabrini-Green to a business-backed center that left her feeling unfulfilled, it wasn’t until Craig, a home visitor and a member of the Educator Advisory Council, joined Head Start that she truly felt like she was where she belonged. Here, she really feels like she is making an impact.

“It’s a reciprocal relationship,” Craig said. “I learn just as much from the families as they do from me.”

As a home visitor, she serves about 200 families—most of them newcomers to the U.S.—helping them navigate everything from early childhood development to housing insecurity. Her visits are more than just lesson plans and screenings. She brings diapers, clothing, and connection. She helps parents access mental health services, early intervention, and dental care. She walks beside them as they build stability, confidence, and hope. Still right now, that work is in jeopardy.

This April, the Department of Health and Human Services abruptly closed five regional Head Start offices, including the one in Chicago. There was no transition plan. No reallocation of responsibilities. Craig said staff showed up to work only to be told they no longer had jobs. And for her center, the consequences were immediate: their grant, which funds everything they do, hadn’t been renewed meaning that it would expire at the end of this month. Recently, however, the center had been notified that it had been granted an extension, Craig said. “So we are now looking at July.”

Craig calls what’s happening and what it could mean for families heartwrenching.

The families she serves are doing their best to make the most with what they have, many working hourly jobs and qualifying for SNAP. Some families have lived in hotels after losing housing due to landlords refusing vouchers. Others are navigating complex systems in a language they don’t speak, fearful to seek help because of the federal actions on immigration. Craig recalls a mother afraid to take her baby to the dentist alone until she stepped in to go with her.

“This work is about empowering families,” Craig said. “Parents are the most important teachers in their children’s lives. We’re just here to support them, to help them find their own solutions.” 

She constantly sees the power of that support: A child with a speech delay now tells stories in full. A mother who once doubted her ability to send her daughter to kindergarten now beams with pride that her daughter is in school. Family nights filled with laughter, learning, and shared meals. 

Craig is a member of Head Start Allies, and alongside others, has been sending postcards and gathering signatures to urge lawmakers to protect Head Start.

“Government isn’t about profit, it’s about protecting people,” Craig said.

She knows the road ahead is uncertain and she also knows what is at stake. A mountain of research supports the efficacy of the Head Start model and the vital importance of strong early childhood experiences.

Early childhood is the most important and impactful time in a person’s life. For families served at Craig’s Head Start and those served through Head Start centers across the country, what’s on the line goes beyond the program itself and to strong starts for hundreds of thousands of young children and the empowering stability the 60-year-old program provides.

Craig and her colleagues remain hopeful that the contract for their center will be renewed.

Bravetta Hassell is the Director of Communications for Advance Illinois.

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Bringing Visibility to the Impacts of Federal Changes on Illinois Education

This month, news dropped that the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE) and at least six universities in our state were suspending a scholarship program that the U.S. Department of Justice called unconstitutional for using race as a qualification.

It was hard to find the name of the program that was suspended – even in the DOJ’s press release – but having confirmed it with a number of credible sources including a program participant, the effort is the Diversifying Higher Education Faculty (DFI) program, an initiative intended to increase the number of minority full-time tenure track faculty and staff at Illinois’ two- and four-year, public and private colleges and universities. 

Decades of research show that when educators share racial and ethnic identities with their students, student academic and non academic outcomes improve. At the college level, student and faculty/staff diversity play a considerable role in underrepresented students’ decision to stay in school. But according to IBHE, ‘the average student attending a public college or university outside the City of Chicago is unlikely to have more than one course with an African American faculty member and unlikely to have even one course with a Latino faculty member during his or her college years.’ This mismatch in representation isn’t unique to Illinois, but plays out in communities across our country and stifles what’s possible for our students and those who seek to teach and mentor them. 

In an effort to ensure that the many and varied impacts of federal changes on education do not go unnoticed or unheard - like the details of the DFI news slipping between the cracks - we are both listening for and actively gathering narratives from students, families, educators, providers, system leaders, and researchers who are living through the effects of education policy changes on their work and lives. But we need your help.

If you are interested in sharing your story for us to uplift on our blog, on social, and our ever-expanding newsletter list of lawmakers, education, researchers, philanthropists, journalists and more, please complete the form linked below. You may use your real name, a pseudonym, or simply list “anonymous.” We only ask that you provide a valid email address so we can follow up with you. 

It is crucial that these experiences are shared so that others may gain awareness and insight into what is happening and how our system, the people who power it, and the people served by it are being affected but also responding to changes. 

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