WASILLA, Alaska – She was a teenager and mother of a 2-year-old child, when there was a knock on the trailer door she called home. Two women were there to tell her about a federally funded preschool program called Start at the front which was opening near his home in Chugiak. Would she be interested in enrolling her daughter?
Then pregnant with her second child, Kristine Bayne signed up. She hoped it would make a difference for her daughter. What she didn’t know: it would also change the trajectory of her life.
Bayne, who completed high school through correspondence courses after becoming pregnant at 16, would get a job at her son’s Head Start. Her confidence grew and she returned to school to earn a bachelor’s degree and a state counseling certificate. She would rise through the ranks at CCS Early Learning, the nonprofit that ran the region’s Head Start centers, and retire as a family partnerships coordinator, providing families with the same kind of help she and her husband received.
“I learned a lot,” says Bayne, now 65. “How to take care of my children, how to defend them, how to have a voice for myself. … They get you where you are and help you move forward to become a better person.
In this part of Alaska, countless parents tell stories like Bayne’s. Head Start helped them earn degrees that put them on track for better jobs. As drug addiction ravages the community, she has helped parents recover and educated children who ended up in foster homes. She did this while preparing young people for kindergarten, conditioning them for the rhythms of the school day, and teaching them to be good friends and students.
That’s why it was so heartbreaking when CCS Early Learning closed Chugiak Head Start, where Bayne had sent her children. In January, it announced it was closing another center — this time in Meadow Lakes, where Bayne’s granddaughter Makayla, who is now in her care, was enrolled.
The imminent closure is not for lack of need. This is the fastest growing part of the 49th state, and the nonprofit’s Head Start program has a waiting list. He can – and has – filled all three classrooms at Meadow Lakes.
The problem is with adults.
Specifically, not enough of them want to work at Head Start. Not when they can make more money working at nearby Target, which raised wages during the pandemic. And not when, with the same credentials, they get a better paying job in the local school district.
As the teacher shortage grows, what’s happening in this corner of the state — a region that contains massive tracts of wild wildlife and a booming bedroom community in Anchorage — offers a preview of what other programs may face.
In 2022, almost a quarter of Head Start teachers left their jobs, some retiring early and others attracted to higher-paying jobs in retail or school districts. Without these teachers, preschools will not be able to serve as many students as before. It means fewer options for parents who want to return to work, but cannot afford child careand fewer early learning opportunities for children from needier families. In rural communitiesHead Start may be the only daycare for working parents.
The number of children and parents served by Head Start has dropped precipitously since its peak in 2013. That year, it served 1.1 million children and pregnant women, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which analyzed federal data. Nine years later, enrollment was around 786,000.
Some of the children who would have enrolled in Head Start migrated to state-funded preschool programs, which expanded. There are also fewer babies being born. Still, the percentage of children in poverty who attend preschool has remained unchanged for two decades, which worries researchers like Steve Barnett of Rutgers University’s National Institute for Early Education Research.
“The fewer resources (children) have at home, the more they benefit from high-quality environments” like Head Start, Barnett says. Without this, he said, they appear in kindergarten even further behind their classmates from middle- and upper-income families.
In Wasilla, the regional Head Start group decided to increase employee salaries to prevent more employees from leaving. To do this, a center had to close. Mark Lackey, executive director of CCS Early Learning, found he was competing for employees with the service sector, which raised wages during the pandemic to lure back reluctant workers. Last year, CCS Early Learning was paying teaching assistants with two years on the job about $16 an hour, while Target was offering more than $17 to entry-level employees, Lackey said.
“It’s just tragic,” Lackey says. “There are so many more kids we could serve.”
Meadow Lakes Head Start was in a strip mall off a four-lane highway, its pine-green facade sandwiched between a charter school and a laundromat that offered showers. The children who arrived there sometimes smiled, sometimes cried, often carrying tiny backpacks to fit their small bodies.
They came from families where their caregivers often struggled with problems too complex to understand: poverty, illness, financial difficulties, lack of shelter. Their caregivers included teenage parents daunted by the responsibility of raising children and grandparents who unexpectedly welcomed grandchildren.
Head Start was there to help them all.
His pioneering, multigenerational approach sought to build healthy environments for the children he served — and that meant supporting the adults in their lives, too. Many of the parents who sent their children to Meadow Lakes attended Head Start, like Cha Na Xiong, who had a child at the school. The son of Hmong refugees, he attended Head Start to learn English, which allowed him to master the language before starting kindergarten.
Kendra Mitchell, whose mother had her at age 16, also attended Head Start and sent her son Wayne to Meadow Lakes School. He will be heading to kindergarten next year, but she said she has seen how it has shaped his life — and hers.
“He is actually verbalizing his emotions and learning how to regulate his emotions at such a young age, which is extremely difficult,” Mitchell said.
Wayne’s childhood was marked by instability as Mitchell struggled with addiction and sent him to live with relatives. Wayne moved back in with her as she began to recover. When she enrolled him in Head Start, she said the staff embraced her without judgment and helped connect her with resources while she recovered. She told officials that she was living in a cabin without running water; they gave her a voucher so she could take Wayne to the nearby laundromat to shower and do laundry.
“They weren’t just lifting our son. They were also lifting us up,” says Mitchell.
In May, the children of Meadow Lakes came and went for the last time. The class began with routines that became familiar. The children sang a song to learn the days of the week, to the tune of “The Addams Family”. They talked about the weather – it was rainy that day – and then lined up to wash their hands before sitting down at two long tables to eat breakfast.
There was a lot more to a school day than met the eye. Each activity was loaded with lessons big and small. As they talked about the calendar – it was May 6th – they practiced saying “sixth.” Teacher Lisa Benson-Nuyen instructed them to “pretend your tongue is a little turtle head sticking out of its shell.” She also taught them that the last day of school can bring a mix of emotions.
“For some people, this is a happy face. For other people, … that’s a sad face,” Benson-Nuyen said.
At breakfast, the kids learned that blueberries don’t belong in ears. Then came teeth brushing and playtime. All of these routines are designed to help children feel safe and learn responsibility. And each conflict with a classmate represented an opportunity to teach children how to interact with each other and manage their emotions. That’s why the classroom had a “comfort corner”, a cozy space with cushions where at least one student was often curled up.
Last week, there were small signs that things were coming to an end. The classroom walls, still decorated in bright colors, were no longer covered with student art. The teachers started talking about what to do with the class pets. On the final day, the team tried to keep things lighthearted and celebratory, even as they struggled to maintain their composure. They dyed the students’ hair bright colors and had a dance party.
Eryn Martin, the show’s office assistant, shouted to Mitchell as she left for the last time: “Good luck, Kendra! You have worked very hard and I am proud of you.”
Martin, herself a Head Start graduate and alumna mother, had been crying all day and her face was once again wet with tears. Willow Palmer practiced what she learned in the classroom: when people are upset, she can help comfort them. The 5-year-old ran back to the classroom and re-emerged with a neon green stuffed frog. She gave it to Martin. Then she leaned over and gave him a hug too.
On the playground that day, some students released butterflies they had watched for weeks inside their classrooms as they emerged from their cocoons. Now they were adults. They flew into the fresh spring air – away from the school and into the unknown.
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