By Shwanika Narayan for the San Francisco Chronicle
Following dozens of impassioned pleas from residents, the Oakland City Council passed a resolution temporarily staving off the closure of three federally funded preschool sites on Tuesday.
But the long-term fate of Oakland’s Head Start program and the low-income families it serves remains in doubt.
The nationwide early education program mostly serves working-class Black, Latino, Asian, indigenous and immigrant communities in Oakland, according to parent advocacy groups.
In January 2020, the city revealed that a federal oversight agency had found a number of deficiencies in its Head Start program, which forced the city to reapply for funding.
The deficiencies cited in a city staff report were related to “overall management of the program systems and use of data to drive quality program outcomes.” Essentially, the oversight agency said the city hadn’t trained its Head Start staff in data systems meant to track how their programs were performing.
When Oakland received its Head Start funding for fiscal year 2021-22, it was $5 million less than the previous year. City staff said in a July report that the smaller $12 million grant would force it to only budget for 105 full-time roles, down from 135, and serve 123 fewer children. Last year, 436 children were enrolled in the program.
In August, right before the school year started, parents who relied on the program for free early education, child care and nutrition services found out what that would mean. The city said it planned to close three of its 15 Head Start sites the next month: the Arroyo Viejo and Tassafaronga centers in East Oakland, and the Franklin Center in Central Oakland.
“Disrupting these services would continue to perpetuate inequity and widen the achievement gap by putting vulnerable communities deeper into risk, especially during the pandemic,” Clarissa Doutherd, executive director of Parent Voices Oakland, a parent-run advocacy organization, told The Chronicle.
Word of the planned closures and staff layoffs prompted Vice Mayor Rebecca Kaplan and three other council members to introduce legislation the council approved in September, sending $1.8 million from the general fund to keep the three sites going.
The resolution adopted this week instructs the city to retain Head Start staff if any other centers are targeted for closure before June 2022. The council is hoping to avoid that; it also directed the city administrator’s office to return by May 2022 with a plan to fully fund the Head Start program until July 2023, the end of the fiscal year.
“In the immediate term it helps hard hit parents and families be able to have access to economic opportunity, and provides a positive environment to kids,” Kaplan said in a text message following the vote. “Over time it has shown to improve kids long-term outcomes in education and reduce crime.”
The City Administrator’s Office, which runs the program, did not return requests for comments.
But keeping teachers may be harder than it sounds.
The federal oversight report cited existing teacher vacancies as one of the deficiencies requiring the city to reapply for funds. Child care centers around the country have struggled to hang on to professional staff, and the issues are particularly pronounced in the Bay Area, where low wages collide with a high cost of living, stressed Sara Bedford, director of the city’s Human Services Department.
“I think it is important that we don’t skip over the fact that the report from the federal government did not just say, give people more training. It says to fill vacancies,” Bedford said at Tuesday’s meeting. “We are fortunate … to have public sector jobs that have wonderful benefits, but as we all know, rent and house payments require actual salaries that you can use.”
Tanisha Payton, a [staff] member of Parent Voices Oakland, called in Tuesday to say it was unacceptable that anti-poverty programs like Head Start remain underfunded, “even though they have been proven to transform the lives of young Oakland families and actually build safe communities.”
The closure of child care centers during the pandemic left many families scrambling for care, and contributed to working mothers leaving the workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Council Member Sheng Thao reflected on her family’s personal reliance on the program.
“My son was a Head Start kid,” she said Tuesday. “And that allowed me to go to work, to go to school, to get an education, and to quite honestly, be where I am today. We are investing in our future, we are investing in Oakland parents who are among the most marginalized people.”
Shwanika Narayan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: shwanika.narayan@sfchronicle.com Twitter/Instagram: @shwanika