Chapter One
PARENTS IN HEAD START 
The 1960's marked a renaissance in America's commitment to assure all citizens an opportunity to live resourceful, equitable, and dignified lives. The writing of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (EOA) demonstrated the country's willingness to help families still handicapped by poverty by providing services relevant to their aspirations and needs. One of EOA's key targets was this nation's children. Many children were entering first grade with problems which prevented them from keeping pace with their peers.

In 1965, Project Head Start was conceived. The strategy was to intervene before a child entered school. Necessary medical, dental, and nutritional attention would be provided, as well as experiences to encourage and stimulate intellectual and social growth. The aim of the program was to provide economically deprived children with the opportunities their affluent peers took for granted - health and nutritional services, social services, education. The creators of Head Start were astute enough to recognize that intervention with the child alone would not be sufficient to realize the program goals. The child is brought up in a family and lives in a community. Therefore, involving parents, as well as the community, in the child's Head Start experience became paramount.

HEAD START'S COALITION WITH PARENTS AND COMMUNITIES

Head Start began to sensitize communities to the importance of providing services which would contribute to children's development into healthy and well-adjusted adults. Head Start personnel did their planning with the community to assure early investment. They worked to keep the community abreast of and interested in the status and needs of Head Start families, so that policy makers and community planners would continue to monitor and adapt programs.

At the same time, Head Start worked to convince parents that their involvement would be most meaningful to them and their children, if their children's Head Start expenence was reinforced by the home and community in which they lived and learned. Without this reinforcement, the Head Start experience would remain limited.

Events during the early and middle part of the decade demonstrated that getting people involved was not difficult if the individuals could see that their involvement would make a difference. Head Start therefore outlined specific roles for parents in the program to provide for effective participation. Roles were designed to offer practical opportunities for program participation, for gaining skills to use in a variety of contexts, and for a deepening of self-confidence and self-esteem. The assumption was made that, as parents began to see themselves as effective influences on their children and their communities, their involvement could be sustained.

THE EVOLV1NG ROLE OF PARENTS

The history and evolution of parent involvement in Head Start demonstrates the capability of a
national program to use the best information it has to design sound services, to exercise the broadness of imagination to experiment, to sustain the courage to systematically reevaluate its efforts, and the energy to reinvest its findings into a program.

Head Start initially saw parents as learners, seeking ways to enrich their child's experience, and fulfilled its responsibility to them by providing education in such areas as nutrition, budget management, and concepts of child development and child rearing. It paid serious attention to the dignity and integrity of parents by giving them a fundamental role in designing their own parent education programs.

In early discussions, Head Start administrators and early childhood specialists suggested using parents in the program as volunteers and aides. They felt this would give parents an opportunity to observe alternate forms of teaching and discipline, and would enable parents to increase their own repertoire of responses to their children. The idea was seized by those who were strong advocates of the use of paraprofessionals in anti-poverty programs.

Evaluations and reports which filtered in from the field added further reasons for bringing parent paraprofessionals into local programs. Parent involvement coordinators realized that parents needed to overcome some of their own feelings of inadequacy before they could serve as strong and convincing models of competence for their children. It seemed logical to hire parents to work in Head Start programs and to use the centers as training grounds for building skills and experiences which would increase parents' eligibility in the competitive job market. Career ladders were developed and parents were recruited as parent involvement coordinators, teachers, teachers' aides, bus drivers and cooks.

Parents were being encouraged to make decisions about their own education as well as the education of their children. This reflected what was happening in the rest of the country at the time. The civil rights movement, new thresholds of minority group-consciousness, and the effectiveness of collective action had revitalized citizen participation in the design, implementation and evaluation of human services. The federal government had mandated parent participation through its policies and guidelines for Head Start and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

The fledgling Head Start programs were opened under the auspices of the Community Action Program. The Economic Opportunity Act read that a community action program was one "which is developed, conducted, and administered with the maximum feasible participation of the residents of the areas and members of the groups served..."

Consultants and inspectors from the Office of Economic Opportunity relied on instructions which gave parents and other residents of poverty areas this measure of control as they assessed Head Start programs throughout the country.

In 1967, Head Start issued the first formal Manual of Policies and Instructions outlining the four areas of parent participation which are still the hallmark of parent involvement in Head Start today:

Parents as decision-makers headed the list because it was anticipated that this would be the most difficult to implement. Parents, staff, and community representatives needed to develop a partnership in decision-making. It was to be a mutual learning process for parents and professionals alike and not a movement to give parents total programmatic control.

The manual recommended a staffing formula for parent involvement and a hierarchy of parent advisory committees so that parents would be able to influence the program at all levels. In 1969 Manual 10A, Parent Involvement, A Workshop of Training Tips for Head Start Staff, appeared, stating that at least 50 percent of the Parent Advisory Committee or Council must be parents and that they must be democratically elected to their posts by the parents of children currently enrolled in the program.

In August of 1972, revisions known as Instructions 1-30, Section B2 (70.2) noted that only by providing parents with an opportunity to influence the program would Head Start's objective of enabling all children to reach their maximum potential be realized. The word "advisory" was dropped and Parent Policy Committees and Councils were delegated responsibilities for staffing, budget, curriculum, grant requests, and other matters relating to program operation. Parents were given veto power over the remaining 50 percent of the membership on these policy groups.

The instructions introduced the concept of Head Start as a social change agent. They specifically stated that in order for children to maintain the momentum they had gathered, families must understand the developmental changes occurng in their children and provide continuity for them within the family and the community The directive pointed to change as a sound prerequisite for growth. It continued that "successful parental involvement enters into every part of Head Start, influences other anti-poverty programs, helps bring about changes in institutions in the community and works toward altering the social conditions that have formed the systems which surround the economically disadvantaged child and his family". Patents were no longer adjunct to the program, but central to it.

Parent involvement could no longer be treated as an isolated component. It had become the undergirding for the entire program and was to determine how all related services were to be organized and administered. Parents were to be involved in the major components of Head Start. Each of the components - health, education, and social services were required to enlist parents to plan and participate in their programs. Staff responsible for other components were to work with the parent involvement staff to ensure a comprehensive, well-integrated plan for involving parents.

Since all parent involvement activities were to be designed to potentially influence and affect other anti-poverty programs, Head Start was thereby connected to the community action network. Parent involvement represented the means by which Head Start's objective of eliminating poverty through community action could be met.

FORMS OF PARENT PARTICIPATION

Head Start offers four primary avenues for parent participation. First, parents join in making decisions about what kind of program to have and how it will operate. Second, parents participate in the classroom as paid employees, volunteers, and observers. Third, parents participate in adult activities which they have planned. Fourth, parents, as prime educators, work with their own children, with the support of the Head Start staff.

Involvement in Decision-Making

Parents join Head Start center staff in making decisions about content and operation of the program and how they and their child will participate in it. Parents will more readily participate if the activities suit their tastes and needs. Therefore, parents' contributions to the design of the program are necessary for its success.

In addition to this informal decision-making process, there is a formal structure in which parents may participate in policy-making and the operation of the program. This structure varies from program to program, but normally consists of a Center Committee at the center level, a Parent Policy Committee at the delegate level, and a Parent Policy Council at the grantee level. Some programs also establish Classroom Committees.

Involvement in the Classroom

Parents who visit and work in the classroom have a better understanding of what the center is doing for their children and the kind of help they may need at home. Their presence demonstrates to the children that their parents are interested in what they are doing at the center. Too, the staff and parents have a good opportunity to become better acquainted and to learn from each other.

Parents may participate in the classroom as paid employees, volunteers, or observers. Qualified parents receive first consideration for employment. As volunteers, parents participate in classroom activities and supplement the services of paid employees. This experience helps them to develop greater skills and self-confidence, consider a variety of child-rearing techniques, and gain experience that could qualify them for paid employment. All parents are encouraged to visit the classroom and observe what goes on during the year.

Parents are respected as adults with interests and aspirations of their own. At the beginning of each year they develop a plan of activities together which give them ongoing opportunities to learn, share, and grow. These activities include adult education programs. In addition, parents work together on community problems of common concern such as health, education, and housing.

Involvement in Home Activities With Their Children

Through home visits by the center staff and suggestions for activities which parents and children can do together, Head Start guides and assists parents in encouraging their children's development. This kind of parent participation reinforces and supports the child's total Head Start experience.

Although parents are not required to permit home visits in order for their child to participate in
Head Start, they should be made aware of the advantages of this service. If parents know that the
Head Start staff views them as the prime educators of their child, they are likely to accept the
staff's assistance in helping their child at home.

NEW DIRECTIONS IN PARENT INVOLVEMENT

Throughout its existence, Head Start has continued to learn from itself. Three years after its
initiation, Head Start noted that children were coming into the program with irreversible deficits.
Intervention had to begin earlier as close to birth as possible. Thirty-four Parent and Child
Centers were established throughout the country beginning in 1968. These centers recognized the total family as a child-rearing system. Their aim was to reach and strengthen the total family - infants, toddlers, preschoolers, school-age children, adults - through a flexible array of intervention strategies. These included home-based programs for infants and toddlers, centers for pre-schoolers, day-care for children of working parents, services for pregnant teenagers, and child and family advocacy programs. The focus was on parent-child interaction, and the program offered parent education on a systematic basis directed toward parents as the prime educators of their children and as educators of other parents.

Head Start's growing recognition of parents as the major facilitators of their children's development also led to the formation of Home Start in 1972. This offered a different model for parent involvement. Using paraprofessional home visitors to help parents increase their parenting skills with their own children at home, Home Start has begun to answer some of the questions about how adults learn, how parents teach their children, and how programs can most effectively support parents.

In 1974, the Child and Family Resource Program was created to assure the continuity and integration of comprehensive health and welfare services for children from the prenatal period through the early school years. It, too, recognized the total family as a child-rearing system with distinct aspirations and values;

Head Start had long been sensitive to the limited impact it could have on children in its relatively brief encounter with them. It -was equally aware of the potentially powerful and ongoing role parents could play as advocates throughout their -children's school years. Project Developmental Continuity was established in 1975 to discover ways to foster working relationships among preschool and elementary school staffs and parents as children moved from home to preschool to school. The project is training parents and public schools to work together.

Data and experience from all of the above projects indicate that parents are eager to learn about their children and their parenting skills and will participate in education programs if their self-esteem and cultural heritage are respected, and if they are permitted to design and choose the program or combination of programs most relevant to their needs.

In 1976, the Exploring Parenting Program was offered to Head Start programs throughout the country as a pilot effort in parent education. The program invited participation and input by parents as they explored options in working with their children and strengthened the parenting skills they already possessed. Hundreds of programs throughout the country became enthusiastically involved in. Exploring Parenting after it was officially launched in 1978 and made available to all Head Start programs interested in using it. It represents the first parent education curriculum developed by the Head Start Bureau for Head Start parents.

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