Missouri’s Head Start programs reach only about 13% of the infants and toddlers eligible for them.
The Trump administration says part of the problem is the program’s rulebook in Missouri and nationwide.
Federal officials want to eliminate more than 1,400 requirements governing Head Start, arguing that less money spent complying with Washington’s rules could help programs save money and serve more children.
Missouri Head Start leaders agree — somewhat. There are too many children they can’t serve, they say, and there are some federal rules they could live without.
Still, they’re uncertain about all of the things Washington wants to eliminate, and aren’t sure the proposed changes will actually help them get more kids through the door.
Head Start was established nationwide in 1965 as a part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. Head Start and Early Head Start were designed to serve as a child development program to help children from low-income families with their child’s educational, social, health, nutritional and even psychological needs. More than 40 million children have gone through the program since.
Nationwide, about 800,000 children are enrolled on an annual basis, and nearly 15,000 of those are from Missouri.
Across the state, 5,000 of those kids were enrolled in Early Head Start, including infants and children up to 3 years old, while the other 10,000 were enrolled in Head Start preschool programs.
Yet the programs reach only 13% of eligible Missouri infants and toddlers and 27% of eligible preschoolers.
The Trump administration’s proposals, which it says will help free up funds to expand enrollment, mark the most significant rewrite of Head Start’s rules in decades. The Office of Head Start has opened a 60-day comment period for the public to share their thoughts.
The proposal would eliminate many detailed federal requirements and give states and local providers greater control over how Head Start operates. It doesn’t expressly cut funding, though it would cap administrative spending at 5%, down from the current 15%.
For those running Head Start in Missouri, though, it’s unclear whether the federal rules are what’s actually keeping children out of the program. And if the universal standards are removed, they’re concerned about what children may lose as a result.
“I’m not opposed to reducing regulation,” said Kimberly Shinn-Brown, who has worked in Head Start for more than three decades and now directs Ozark Area Community Action Corp’s Head Start offerings at more than 20 centers across southwest Missouri.
“Let us take away some of the regulations that don’t move us forward in terms of quality, in terms of outcomes for children, outcomes for families, outcomes for communities. Yeah, let’s strip those away,” Shinn-Brown said.
Do fewer rules mean more kids in Missouri Head Start classrooms?
Ashley Phillips, the executive director of the Community Action Partnership of Greater St. Joseph, said some of the federal regulations can be redundant with state rules.
“The current rules we have are very prescriptive,” Phillips said.
Things like CPR or first aid training for staff overlap with Missouri’s requirements. Federal rules also lay out timeline requirements for things like home visits or health screenings, which can be difficult to meet in rural areas with fewer providers, Phillips said.
Head Start programs currently must complete sensory, hearing and vision screenings within 45 days of a child starting a program and verify things like health insurance enrollment within 30 days.
“There are sometimes … requirements that are very difficult to meet because it is hard to find providers in our community,” Phillips said. “So we find ourselves in a situation where we are out of compliance, not because we don’t know that it’s important, but because finding providers is difficult for Medicaid.”
Phillips sees potential for the changes to free programs up from duplicative or limiting rules.
But Kasey Lawson, the director of Head Start programs for the Mid-America Regional Council, said federal regulations aren’t necessarily what keeps its programs in Jackson, Platte and Clay counties from growing.
“I would definitely say it’s available space for us,” Lawson said.
Many of their facilities are at capacity, and finding qualified staff who are dedicated to early childhood development can be difficult.
“It’s not just about having a person in the classroom,” Lawson said. “It’s really having a qualified person to work in early childhood.”
The numbers support what Lawson sees.
Missouri public schools reported nearly 500 vacant early childhood education positions in the 2025-2026 school year, one of the state’s three largest certification-area shortages.
The federal government estimates the proposed changes could save more than $2 billion. But W. Steven Barnett, an economist and the director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, questions how the government can project so much in savings while also predicting more children will enroll in the program.
“You can have one of those two, but you can’t have both,” Barnett said.
How is Head Start different from childcare?
The proposed changes don’t just eliminate paperwork. In some cases, they would allow Head Start programs to rely on Missouri’s childcare standards in place of stricter federal requirements.
Barnett says that’s where deregulation risks changing the nature of Head Start.
“It’s a child development program,” Barnett said. “It’s not a childcare program.”
State standards establish minimum requirements for childcare, while Head Start is intended to prepare children from low-income households for school and provides comprehensive health screenings and employment support for families.
“What the states require is the baseline for minimum health and safety,” Shinn-Brown said. “It is not an indicator of quality by any measure.”
Classroom size is one example. The proposal would eliminate federal Head Start staff-to-child ratios and group size requirements, allowing programs to follow state licensing standards.
For 4-year-olds in Missouri, the standards are the same. But the difference is larger for younger children. Under current Early Head Start rules, the program limits classes for children under 3 years old to a maximum group size of eight or nine kids, with a staff ratio of one adult for every four toddlers.
“If we leave that requirement in the dust and we adopt the state licensing requirements,” Shinn-Brown said, “we would potentially be serving 16 2-year-olds in a group with two teachers.”
A randomized study Barnett co-authored found that preschoolers in classes of 15 had more one-on-one interactions with teachers and more literacy gains than kids in classes of 20, though they found no significant difference in vocabulary or math.
“With Head Start,” Barnett said, “if you want it to be effective, give teachers fewer kids, not more kids.”
Providers are also worried about what happens when detailed federal requirements around health and developmental services change or disappear.
The proposal doesn’t eliminate Head Start’s underlying obligation to support children’s health. Instead, it would wipe many of the federal rules telling programs how to meet those obligations.
Barnett sees that as a potential upside.
“The regulatory changes don’t mean that Head Start still doesn’t make sure that kids get those things,” he said. “It just means there’s not 100 pages telling us how to do that.”
He pointed to programs devoting time and staff to documenting screenings, referrals and other services for federal compliance.
“If that’s what you’re getting rid of, I say good riddance,” Barnett said.
Shinn-Brown, however, said her organization’s screenings are constantly identifying children with unmet health needs.
“That happens all the time, all the time,” Shinn-Brown said.
“We know that the healthcare system is fractured. There’s not another kind of one-stop shop that coordinates and connects families and young children with the care, support, resources and information that they need,” she said.
If rules do change, what happens next for Head Start in Missouri?
The proposed rules aren’t final, and programs could have the opportunity to shape new standards and requirements moving forward.
Phillips said her program could maintain standards beyond what Washington asks.
That could mean “internal policies that go above and beyond what the standard requires,” she said.
Missouri providers don’t dispute that Head Start could use reforms or that more families should have access.
What’s unclear is whether eliminating hundreds of federal requirements will truly address the constraints providers identify — such as space, staffing, healthcare provider shortages — or simply give them more control over the services they already provide.
“Fewer regulations can’t mean fewer results,” Shinn-Brown said.
This article first appeared on Beacon: Missouri and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
