“I am out of the office on furlough and unable to take your call.”
The outgoing message at the Philadelphia office of Linda Savage, regional director for the Pennsylvania Head Start Program, is like many others around the country on day three of a federal government shutdown that has upwards of 800,000 federal employees temporarily out-of-work.
But the message has incited internal panic in the organization as members scramble to determine who will be affected next by the shutdown that has already shuttered 23 Head Start programs serving nearly 19,000 children in 11 states.
“We’re in the process of trying to figure that out,” said Karen Grimm-Thomas, assistant director at Pennsylvania Head Start, a provider of early education, health and nutritional services to low-income children. “Phones are ringing off the hook with everybody wanting to know what’s going on.”
The national Head Start program is broken down into three regions.
Region III serves the states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Colombia.
So far, there have been no programs cut in Region III, including those in Elk, McKean, Potter and Cameron counties, which serves 217 children.
“We’re fortunate in Pa. that no programs have had to shut their doors immediately, but should this (shutdown) continue into November you could see some programs getting into trouble,” Grimm-Thomas said.
The 23 Head Start programs that closed did so after running out of funding on Sept. 30. They were not re-funded after Congress failed to approve annual appropriations funding by Monday’s midnight deadline, resulting in the ongoing government shutdown.
The same problem will present itself to those programs set to run out of funding before Nov. 1 if Congress fails to pass appropriations funding by then. But identifying which programs have the Nov. 1 funding expiration date has proven difficult with the programs essentially deprived of a home office.
“The folks that would be able to tell us are at the regional office in Philadelphia, but they’re closed so we can’t look to them,” Grimm-Thomas said. “The one organization that could tell us is not picking up the telephone … is not there.”
Grimm-Thomas explained that there are no funds to be carried over from year to year as Head Start programs are required to expend all funds awarded in a grant cycle. She equated this to “a family living paycheck-to-paycheck.
“Since the government closed, if they get to a point at the end of the contract year they will not be able to get funding,” she said.
Reimbursements for costs incurred in providing Head Start services during the shutdown have also been delayed by it.
Grimm-Thomas said programs are in some cases taking out lines of credit to feed the children they serve adding, “those costs could start to rack up.”
The shutdown is only the latest setback in an otherwise turbulent year for Head Start programs still coming off what executive director Blair Hyatt called the “most significant cuts ever” in the organization’s 40-year history.
In August, Pennsylvania’s Head Start and Early Head Start programs were hit with $15 million in federal budget sequestration cuts. Head Start programs nationwide were set to lose in excess of $405 million.
