Supporting parents through Head Start-child care center partnerships.

• Author: Lim, Youngok
• Position: Report

Abstract

Partnerships between child care centers and Head Start can meet the increased child care needs of low-income parents that resulted from the welfare reform in 1996 and improve children's school readiness by providing full-day, full-year, and high quality child care services. They can also provide comprehensive services for low-income parents such as job training classes and employment referral services that will enhance parents' productivity and ease job searches. Using data collected from parents in Ohio (N=1,605), we estimate the probability of a parent selecting a child care center partnered with Head Start based on several parent characteristics. We find that parents in job training programs, in school, searching for a job, and working long hours are more likely to choose partnership centers. Next, we examine what types of family comprehensive services are offered through Head Start and child care partnerships. We find that parents of children in partnership centers are more likely to receive information about employment enhancement services than parents of children in unpartnered centers. Moreover, the spillover effects of employment enhancement services suggest that the benefits of such services extend to a larger population. These Head Start-child care center partnership services help low-income families become self-sufficient, a goal that cannot be achieved through child care subsidies alone. Not only do low-income working parents benefit, but communities and the wider economy as well.

Introduction

In 2002, 63 percent of the 19 million children under 5 years of age were enrolled in some form of regular child care during a typical week (Johnson, 2005). When we look at primary child care arrangements for children under age five, 24.3 percent were cared for at organized facilities such as day care centers, nursery schools and Head Start programs, 24.8 percent were cared for by relatives and another 17.2. percent were cared by non-relatives (2) (Johnson, 2005). However, this distribution of types of care shifts when we look at families in poverty. Families in poverty with employed mothers rely more heavily on care by a relative or father (60 percent) than on child care centers (14 percent) or family child care homes (7 percent), because they cannot afford the latter options. Moreover, about 22 percent of children under age five with employed mothers have multiple arrangements so that the mother can work. These statistics describe challenges that working families, particularly low-income working families, are facing today.

In 2002, in order to ease these burdens on low-income working families, the federal government devoted 11.2 billion dollars to child care and 6.5 billion dollars to Head Start (Center for Law and Social Policy, 2007). Simply increasing spending, however, may not solve all the challenges faced by low-income working families today. For example, low-income working parents who are eligible for Head Start programs and want to have Head Start services for their children may not be able to do so because Head Start programs are typically running on a part-day and part-year basis and working parents need child care arrangements full-day and full-year. As a result, children who could benefit the most from the enriched learning environments and comprehensive services of Head Start are not receiving them.

One way to address this issue is to encourage partnerships between Head Start and child care providers to jointly deliver services. Partnerships between Head Start and child care providers allow children from low-income working families to receive learning enrichment services and comprehensive services from Head Start while enabling their parents to work full-time. Such partnerships also offer potential economic benefits for parents. They can increase their labor force participation and their productivity if stable, high quality child care is available on a full-day and full-year basis (Carillo, 2004; Shellenback, 2004; Abt Associates, 2002). Partnership benefits to children are access to high quality learning environments and comprehensive services such as developmental screenings and health care referrals. Moreover, such partnerships offer parents the chance to enhance their self-sufficiency. These types of comprehensive services can yield positive parents outcomes.

Although these significant benefits to children and parents can be expected from Head Start and child care provider partnerships, there is no research to date that has examined such partnerships closely. This paper intends to remedy this by exploring the family comprehensive services provided through partnerships with child care centers to enhance low-income parents' self-sufficiency. Using data collected from parents in Ohio, we aim to fill existing holes in the current literature by examining the following two questions: (1) what are the sociodemographic characteristics of parents associated with selecting a Head Start and child care center partnership? Are there differences in selection patterns for low-income parents? (2) What types of family comprehensive services, especially services related to employability, are provided to parents by partnership centers? Are there spillover effects? The next section provides an overview of Head

Start-child care partnerships, followed by a description of Ohio's early childhood education policy. We review existing literature in section 5 and discuss a theoretical approach to examining the potential economic benefits of partnerships. In sections 6 and 7, we look at data and results. In the final section, we discuss needs for future research in this area.

Overview of Partnerships between Head Start and Child Care Providers

Head Start programs and child care subsidy programs were designed to support children from low-income families. Although these two programs share a common purpose, there exist several noteworthy differences between them. Originally, child care subsidies were allocated to support low-income parents' participation in the labor force, while Head Start programs were developed to promote low-income children's development and school readiness. In terms of program design, the child care subsidy system is a demand-side system, while Head Start more closely resembles a supply-side system. The federal government gives the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF), a block grant, to states to be used for child care subsidies. States have considerable flexibility in setting regulations for these subsidy programs. Head Start funding, on the other hand, flows directly from the federal government to local programs.

These differences between Head Start and CCDF may pose challenges for low-income working families and their children. While Head Start programs provide learning enrichment programs and other comprehensive services for children and their low-income parents, they are rarely a viable option for these families because Head Start usually runs on a part-day and part-year basis. This became a more serious issue after the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) (3)--typically known as welfare reform.

Partnerships between Head Start and child care centers have increased in response to changes in the needs of low-income families. With the development of partnership centers, these families' children can receive Head Start services in addition to child care from a single provider, thus avoiding the need to be transported back and forth. At the same time, parents can work, participate in job training, or attend school without interruptions due to problematic child care arrangements. A child in a partnership center often finds himself or herself in a "mixed classroom", where both Head Start and non-Head Start children are placed together and where both Head Start performance standards and child care licensing regulations are met. As a result, a child in a partnership center is more likely to be cared for by a better qualified teacher in a classroom with better teacher-to-child ratios (4). Head Start and child care center partnerships offer full-day and full-year (5) child care services while parents work. Additionally, they have three other unique benefits: an education component for children, comprehensive services for children, and family comprehensive services for parents.

In order to provide continuous child care service for children and their working parents, partnerships typically blend funding from Head Start with other sources such as child care subsidies, parent fees, or both. Since children eligible for Head Start are usually eligible for child care subsidies, a partnership typically involves blending funding from Head Start with Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) (i.e. child care subsidies).

In this paper, we focus on partnerships between Head Start and child care centers. We narrowly define a partnership as a formal agreement, usually a contract, between a Head Start agency and a child care center, entered into with the aim of jointly delivering services to eligible families. However, Head Start and child care partnerships can take various forms. For example, it is possible to have an organization such as Head Start offer extended hours (6) of service by blending their own funding with child care subsidies or contracting with a family child care provider to serve Head Start-eligible children. These types of partnerships are less common than those between Head Start and child care centers. Since partnerships between Head Start agencies and child care centers are usually based on a formal written contracts, discontinuation of partnerships can occur when contracts end and are not renewed. Likewise, new partnerships can form when contracts are established between Head Start and previously non-partnered centers.

In this paper, we focus on the family comprehensive services for parents provided through Head Start and child care center...