HUFFINGTON
07.21.13
“FRUSTRATING ... CLAUSTROPHOBIC ... HELPLESS”
people just like Reynolds and Bella,
Misty and April. The policy’s designers made a bet in the summer
of 2011 that a deficit-reduction
cleaver that decimated defense and
harmed the most vulnerable would
be abhorrent to Republicans and
Democrats alike. They lost the bet.
Sequestration went into effect on
March 1, 2013, after lawmakers
failed to agree on a replacement.
In Washington, the conventional
wisdom has sometimes held that
sequestration’s harms were oversold. Dire warnings of massive job
loss never came true, while government programs used budget gimmickry to keep operating.
Outside the Beltway, the perception of sequestration is sharply,
viscerally different. Budget cuts
have resulted in fewer meals for seniors, less financial aid for scientific
research, poorer natural disaster
preparedness and more expensive
treatments for cancer patients.
The Huffington Post set out to
tell the story of another slice of
sequestration: the damage being
done to Head Start. The 5.27 percent reduction to the $8 billion
program is having a devastating
effect on families with children
in the program, according to interviews with parents across the
country. Not everyone has experienced the loss of a child’s Head
Start slot or a teary living room
conversation. But parents have
been left fearful and scrambling,
worried that the cuts are shredding an already frayed social safety net upon which they depend.
H
ead Start’s overarching goal is to
provide educational
services to low-income families. But
its functions go well beyond that.
Funded through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Head Start supplies many of
the more than 960,000 children
it serves with two hot meals a day,
transportation to and from school,
and basic medical care like vision and hearing tests. (Vermont
Head Start’s tooth tutor program
provides young kids with proper
dental hygiene.)
Critics of the program have
called it subsidized day care. But
parents benefiting from Head Start
say it keeps their lives afloat.
When she was told that Bella had
been dropped from the Head Start
rolls, Reynolds had few options.
Unemployed and living off Social
Security benefits that started after
her husband drowned two years
ago, she didn’t have the money for
quality day care while she looked