Observing and Interacting With Professionals, Children and Families in an Early Childhood Setting

                Over the past two weeks of module 2, I interacted with a variety of professionals.  Besides the classroom teacher Kathleen, I also interacted with the building principal, the school social worker, and the director of the NMCAA agency.  I spent time talking to the principal about how the impending budget cuts in Michigan would affect children in poverty.  I had assumed that she would discuss the programs affected by the cuts as the main issue but learned that this was only one side of the issue.  For example, because of budget cuts, the school will have to lay off their full-time social worker and replace her with a part-time social worker shared between three schools.  This means the kids in poverty would lose an advocate at the building level.  This left me wondering how I would help the children in poverty in my class to get the services they needed because I do not have the resources that the social worker has.

                The discussion with the building principal left me questioning my advocacy efforts.  I believed that I had heard the worst of the cuts until I talked with the NMCAA director who oversees the Head Start classes in our area.  She stated that all Head Start classes in our area would be limited to four hours a day instead of the full day programs they are right now.  One of my focus questions for my paper discusses the role of parents in the early childhood experience.  Parents who send their kids to Head Start use their time away from their kids working and/or going to school.  Now they will have to either find daycare for the kids or will have to go to school or work less.  What effect will this have on early childhood education for their child?  Will the parents be able to keep their kids in the program or will they have to find a cheap alternative care that is not as high of a quality? 

                Regardless of a person’s personal views about Head Start and its effectiveness of helping children in poverty, it seems clear to me that the cuts made in my area will have clear negative effects on children in the early childhood setting.  I have spent the past years working in, believing in, and advocating for Head Start and am struggling to make sense of these cuts that will clearly affect the children we serve.