Before You Reach Out… For Community Colleges
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For Community Colleges
So, you’re interested in partnering with your local Head Start provider. Before you reach out, here are the things we recommend you know and/or consider before starting the conversation:
Questions to Ask:
What value do you see in partnering with your Head Start provider to offer on-campus services? You will want to be clear with the Head Start provider what your goals are from this partnership.
What does your institution bring to the partnership? Identify the space available on-campus and when it will be available for the Head Start provider to utilize. Be sure to include the square footage both indoor and outdoor as those are specific requirements in Head Start.
What are the needs of current and potential students regarding on-campus child care? This starts with being able to answer the question: ‘Who are your student parents on campus?’ Consider connecting with departments on campus, such as student life, to identify how many students are parents and the number and ages of their children.
Which students will be eligible? Consider what proportion of slots the college would like reserved for student-parents and which students will be eligible for those spots of those who meet the criteria below. Will it be any enrolled student? Does the student need to have a declared program or major? Can it be a student signed up for one course only?
Eligibility:
“Understanding the eligibility requirements of Head Start is paramount. Even though you have a student or potential student, they may not be eligible for Head Start.”
There are four main categories of eligibility for Head Start:
A family’s income is equal to or below the federal poverty line;
The family is eligible for public assistance, such as TANF, SSI, and SNAP;
The family is experiencing homelessness according to the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act; or
The child is in foster care.
Programs may also, under certain circumstances, enroll children who would benefit from services but do not qualify under these criteria, as well as those whose income is between 100% and 130% of the poverty line.
Finally, programs must ensure that at least 10% of the children they serve have a diagnosed disability, meaning they are eligible for services under IDEA.
Best Practices:
Review the basics of Head Start before reaching out to your local program—Head Start sees itself very separately from public pre-K and child care. Head Start is a federally-funded program with a comprehensive approach to early learning and serves the most vulnerable children and families. Child care, public pre-K, and day care are all different services which focus on different populations. Review the “Overview of Head Start” section in this resource guide to learn more.
Make sure you objectively assess your institution’s space availability and timelines for capital projects, if needed. Review your institution’s facilities master plan. What Head Start needs most to start up this partnership is space that meets the needs of their children and staff. Your campus’s near-term plans for capital improvements or upcoming plans to rent out space are critically important to understanding what you can offer Head Start.
Identify champions across your institution that will support the establishment of the partnership. Bureaucracy is a common hurdle at community colleges, so getting support at a variety of levels is critical to success. Consider not just your school’s leadership, like presidents and trustees, but the head of the early childhood department or the leader of the student life center.
Obtain a better understanding of student-parents on campus and their needs. It will be hard to speak to what your campus needs most if you’re not aware of how many student-parents you have enrolled, how old their children are, how many children they have, and what they’re currently doing for child care.
“Our campus leadership sees a really nice connection with early childhood education and our students. This type of partnership would alleviate some of the previous concerns from when we had our own child care center. We now have a deeper understanding of our students’ basic needs and child care continues to be one that’s at the forefront of students’ minds. Our leadership is just really invested in early childhood education and child care, so we have a lot of champions.”
Vocabulary Check-In
The U.S. Department of Education awards some community colleges money for child care through the Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) program. Colleges apply for these competitive grant dollars to support the low-income student-parents they serve, either by offering care on campus or providing them vouchers to access care elsewhere in the community. CCAMPIS dollars can be used to cover both child care and before- and after-school care for older children.