Head Start Is Too Important to Weaken: What the Proposed Changes Could Cost New Jersey

Head Start employs more than 4,300 early childhood professionals in New Jersey. If programs are expected to save money by reducing staffing, those job losses could place additional pressure on the rest of the child care sector. Programs already struggling to find qualified teachers could face even greater competition, disruption, and instability.

The proposal would also reduce the allowable cap for administrative costs from 15% to 5%. Administration is not simply paperwork. It includes fiscal management, human resources, technology, data systems, insurance, compliance, and the human infrastructure needed to run a comprehensive program.

Programs cannot absorb a reduction of this size without difficult choices. Cuts could affect staff positions, employee benefits, family services, vendor contracts, professional development, program hours, or classroom quality. Each reduction would affect another part of the early childhood ecosystem.

Families Could Lose Essential Health and Developmental Supports

The proposal would remove detailed requirements governing health, dental, vision, and developmental screenings; follow-up care; referrals; family partnerships; and coordination with medical providers.

Delayed screenings can allow manageable concerns to become more serious and costly. Early identification gives children the best opportunity to benefit from intervention while reducing future pressure on families, schools, and health systems.

Reducing these screenings and services could delay identifying children’s needs, leaving families without timely support and requiring schools to provide more intensive—and potentially more costly—interventions later.

Head Start Is Too Big to Fail

Saying that Head Start is “too big to fail” is not simply about the size of the program. It is about the breadth of its impact and the number of systems that are connected to it.

Head Start helps young children learn to communicate, regulate their emotions, cooperate with others, solve problems, make choices, and become more independent. These are the foundational skills children carry into kindergarten, later education, employment, and adulthood.

If Head Start is weakened:

• Children could receive less individual attention and fewer comprehensive services.
• Dual-language learners could lose culturally and linguistically responsive instruction.
• Parents could face new barriers to employment, education, and job training.
• Early childhood educators and family-support professionals could lose jobs.
• Local vendors and service providers could lose business.
• Child care programs could face additional demand they lack the capacity or funding to meet.
• Schools and health systems could inherit greater unmet developmental, behavioral, and medical needs.
• Families could lose trusted partners who help them navigate complex systems.

No single program could easily replace everything Head Start provides. Child care alone would not replace its health, nutrition, disability, and family services. Schools could not fully replace its support for infants, toddlers, pregnant women, and working families. Community organizations could not absorb its statewide reach without significant new resources.

Weakening Head Start would not reduce costs. It would shift those costs and responsibilities to families, employers, child care providers, school districts, health systems, community organizations, small businesses, and other parts of our state.

Head Start can evolve, and unnecessary administrative burdens should be addressed. But modernization should strengthen its comprehensive model—not dismantle the standards that make it effective.

Head Start is part of New Jersey’s educational foundation, child care ecosystem, workforce infrastructure, health and human-services network, and local economy. It is too important to weaken, too interconnected to dismantle, and too valuable to fail.