Santa Barbara County Providers Warn Trump Administration’s Latest Proposal Would ‘Gut’ Head Start

When a mother and her young son moved to Santa Barbara from Nicaragua, they found support from CommUnify, the nonprofit organization that facilitates the region’s Head Start programs.

The organization’s routine health screenings revealed that the boy had a cavity in every tooth, according to Martha Haro, site supervisor for CommUnify’s Coronel Center on the city’s Westside. A staff member drove the boy to Oxnard to receive care, and the center educated the child’s mother on proper nutrition — with stricter limits on sugar. 

Despite these kinds of positive interventions provided by Head Start, the federal government is seeking to “gut” the national program — which has provided early childcare, education, and other services to low-income families since 1964 — from the inside out, said CommUnify CEO Patricia Keelean. 

A Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) from the Department of Health and Human Services would significantly alter the program under the guise of reducing regulatory burdens and red tape, while saving an estimated $2.2 billion.

It would cut nearly 1,400 regulatory provisions that govern how Head Start is implemented, allowing more flexibility within the program, the administration said. 

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reportedly wants to improve nutrition and physical activity requirements for Head Start, and claimed the new rules could streamline it and open seats for more children. 

However, Keelean claims the changes would do nothing but reduce the quality of services they can provide. The administration tried to “zero out” Head Start in 2025 but was unsuccessful due to congressional intervention; this, she said, is just another attempt at undermining the program. 

The notice was released in August. Keelean said they have spent the last month digging into the 150 pages of proposed changes to figure out the impact on Santa Barbara County, which has the highest poverty rate in the state, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Head Start is, at its heart, an anti-poverty program, Keelean said. She noted that Congressmember Salud Carbajal previously worked for CommUnify and dubbed it “Even Start,” putting disadvantaged kids on equal footing with their peers before they enter elementary school. 

“We’re not just a daycare center,” Keelean said. 

At the Coronel Center, they have created a second home for their students. The kitchen is stocked with fruits and vegetables, and a cook prepares healthy meals and snacks for kids around the clock. Young students do arts and crafts in a clean, cozy classroom, neatly arranged with books and toys, and have access to an outdoor learning and play space. Teachers are kind and patient.

The administration’s proposed changes would strip away the services meant to lift families out of poverty: all-day childcare for parents who work two to three jobs each, high-quality education and nutrition, health screenings, and job support and other aid for parents. 

One major change increases student-to-teacher ratios. Larger classrooms would reduce the program’s quality of education, especially since many students need individualized attention due to behavioral challenges or learning disabilities, Keelean said. This demographic makes up about 20 percent of CommUnify’s student population. 

Additionally, the number of toddlers per teacher could triple: from four per teacher to 12 per teacher — which is a safety risk, Keelean said.

The proposals would also split daily childcare into morning and afternoon sessions to serve twice the number of families, but only for three hours at a time. This sounds good in theory, but the center’s families “require full-time care,” Keelean said. 

Additionally, it would reduce spending on administrative overhead from 15 percent to 5 percent, which are dollars they use to provide “quality oversight” — paying for human resources or fixing broken equipment, for example — and health services to families.

Salaries in Head Start are low, Keelean said, working with what the government provides. Many teachers would likely make more money at In-N-Out, she noted, but stay with Head State because they are passionate about the work. Increasing class sizes may push them to burnout. 

All instruction would need to be given in English, as well, rather than bilingually as it currently is — which would greatly affect Head Start in Santa Barbara County. It adds on to a proposed rule released last summer, which would bar undocumented children from Head Start entirely (that proposal is on pause due to ongoing litigation).

The average family CommUnify serves are Spanish speakers, Haro noted. More than 75 percent are working families.

Also gone would be the required vision, dental, hearing, and mental health screenings and consultations that these low-income families, such as the single family from Nicaragua, rely on.

There would be some additional requirements within the proposed changes, including a minimum of 30 minutes of physical activity, ideally outside, for every three and a half hours of instruction. Programs would also be required to provide nutrient-dense whole foods within the framework of the USDA Child and Adult Care Food Program meal standard. 

However, whether the programs will need to adhere to the changed rules remains unclear. Alex Adams, the assistant secretary at the Administration for Children and Families, reported that programs can continue to operate as they currently do, if they wish to, as long as they implement the new nutrition and physical activity requirements. 

“If a program likes its ratio, it can keep its ratio. If a program likes its group size, it can keep its group size. This does not require them to do anything different. As I said, flexibility is permission; it’s not a mandate,” Adams told reporters. 

However, the actual regulations do not specify the new rules as being optional. It does not say programs have a choice, and Head Start centers across the country worry that the federal government will withhold grants from programs that try to maintain previous staffing and regulations and do not adhere to the changed rules. 

“In broad strokes, what we are trying to accomplish is we built this rule around trusting local leaders to make the decisions that are best for their local communities,” Adams told reporters.

But Keelean worries the effects go deeper than that. 

“We’re concerned that these new rules are going to literally gut our model, our Head Start model, and render it ineffective for addressing poverty and helping families to lift themselves out of poverty,” she said.

If the rules do pass, “we’re going to have to sit down and assess community needs,” Keelean expects. “We’ll look at the new regulations, and we’ll have to completely reproject what we’re able to do based on what the new regulations require or don’t require.”

Nothing is set in stone yet. Comments in the federal register can be submitted here. The open comment period will close this Tuesday, October 6. After the comment period closes, the federal government must review all public comments, and the proposed rules will undergo congressional review.