GREENFIELD — Head Start centers like the one on Washington Street are expected to remain closed, despite a commitment from Gov. Maura Healey and state lawmakers to prioritize funding for this and other early child education programs in the state’s fiscal year 2025 budget.

Advocates say the continued closure is due to a lack of staff and a focus on directing funds toward increasing salaries for current educators.

“Our legislative champions and leaders have seen the work that Head Start programs do in our local communities and seen the importance of Head Start programming,” said Michelle Haimowitz, executive director of the Massachusetts Head Start Association. “Our Head Start wages have been lagging significantly behind where they need to be to pay our teachers a decent and fair wage.”

Across Massachusetts, Head Start provides free child care and other services to more than 11,000 children ages 3 to 5 who are from low-income families, in foster care or experiencing homelessness. The program is funded federally, and states supplement the programs with additional dollars.

Although state legislators announced their support, they did not fully commit to the $20 million requested from the Massachusetts Head Start Association for the fiscal year 2025 budget — a 14% increase from the current year’s appropriation of $17.5 million.

“It’s going to be a challenge. I’m sure you’ve all been reading that we’re not in the same fiscal position as we have been over the last few years. But the sky’s not falling,” said Senate Ways and Means Committee Chair Michael Rodrigues, adding that he “absolutely” considers children and families to be a priority in budget talks.

Through the first six months of fiscal year 2024, the state collected $769 million less in taxes than the projections used to craft the annual budget. Healey responded by cutting $375 million in spending, tapping another $625 million in non-tax revenue and decreasing the annual revenue forecast by $1 billion. And after January’s revenues came in, the state now finds itself $263 million below the downgraded estimates. Budgetwriters will have to craft the fiscal year 2025 budget with those slumping revenues in mind in the months ahead.

Community Action Pioneer Valley administers Head Start and Early Head Start programs for children up to age 5 in Franklin, Hampshire and western Hampden counties through branches in six communities, including Turners Falls and Orange. Closing the Greenfield location last summer was part of a larger effort to avoid a potential loss of $3 million in federal funding.

Article continues after...

Yesterday's Most Read Articles

Political newcomer defeats Shores Ness for Deerfield Selectboard seat

South County Senior Center opts not to renew church lease after rift over LGBTQ program

More than 130 arrested at pro-Palestinian protest at UMass

As I See It: Between Israel and Palestine: Which side should we be on, and why?

Moratoriums on large-scale solar, battery storage passed in Northfield

Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls to open on plant sale day, May 11

“We’ve been in the building at least since 1976, in one form or another, and we served preschoolers at that site,” explained Anat Weisenfreund, director of Community Action Pioneer Valley’s Head Start program. “We had two classrooms of 15 to 17 preschoolers each in that building and we have not had children in there since last summer.”

Closing the Greenfield location reduced enrollment by 30 to 34 slots. Weisenfreund added that children from this location were placed at other Head Start locations or child care centers in the area.

Across the state, early education centers are facing issues attracting and retaining teachers, particularly in rural communities. Many say the shortage is fueled by a lack of interest in the profession overall, especially for college students, and lower wages.

“We’re seeing a real lack of child care in Franklin County,” Weisenfreund said. “We call it a child care desert.”

The Massachusetts Association for the Education of Young Children is a professional membership association that works to increase access to early childhood education and advocates for educators in the profession. Patty Sinclair, the organization’s president, said increasing wages for educators has a positive effect on the services children receive.

“Wages are very much part of that journey to having a high-quality experience for children,” Sinclair said. “Continuity of care is really critical in terms of outcomes for children, and in order to have continuity of care, we have to have teachers who are passionate and compensated so that they’ll want to stay in the field.”

Weisenfreund said that after Community Action Pioneer Valley increased salaries for educators to up to $30 an hour, it saw an increase in applicants and hired more staff.

“The vast majority of [educators] go to the public schools because historically the public preschools have paid much more than the Head Start program,” Weisenfreund said. “We gave pretty significant raises to our staff that would be competitive with the public schools and since we’ve given those raises, most of our positions were filled within weeks.”

Weisenfreund added that the difficulty in hiring early educators is also due to long-time neglect of the profession.

“It’s a field that primarily employs women,” she said. “There’s been this assumption that women take care of children and we don’t have to pay them very much, even though it’s probably the hardest job in the world.”

As to whether the Greenfield Head Start location will open again, Weisenfreund said she is hopeful that will happen in the next few years once more federal funding is available.

“Nobody has a crystal ball, but I think that within the next couple of years we do expect that the Office of Head Start will make expansion funding available and we will certainly apply for that as soon as we have an opportunity to,” Weisenfreund said. “We absolutely want to bring services back to Greenfield because we know they’re needed.”

Tanisha Bhat writes for the Greenfield Recorder from the Boston University Statehouse Program. Information from State House News Service was used in this article.

An earlier version of this article inaccurately described how closure of the Greenfield Head Start location impacted enrollment. Closing the Greenfield location reduced enrollment by 30 to 34 slots.