Vancouver-based Educational Opportunities for Children and Families serves more than 400 participants enrolled in Head Start. The free federal program provides child care, early learning, nutrition and health screenings for low-income children and their families. Nearly 300 children in Southwest Washington either lost access to their Head Start programs or had their hours cut back on Nov. 1 because of the government shutdown, which ended on Wednesday evening.
On Monday, EOCF’s board of directors and its parent policy council voted to approve accepting a private donation to replenish the nonprofit’s savings it had been using to keep open three Head Start centers in Vancouver for families with the highest needs. EOCF has now reopened its Head Start center in Yacolt, four centers in Vancouver and restored program hours cut at five other centers. The donation has also helped EOCF to bring back more than 90 employees who were partially or fully furloughed on Nov. 1 when it didn’t get its scheduled federal funding.
EOCF CEO Rekah Strong says it could take weeks before its grant funding resumes because of the backlog in grant applications from other Head Start providers across the nation who also had to cut services during the shutdown. She joins us to share the struggles her organization has recently faced, along with Chantel Martin, a Head Start parent whose 5-year-old daughter attends the reopened EOCF center in Yacolt.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The longest government shutdown in U.S. history is now over. It officially ended on Wednesday, but the repercussions are still being felt. Nearly 300 children in Southwest Washington either lost access to their Head Start programs or had their hours cut back on November 1. Vancouver-based Educational Opportunities for Children and Families [EOCF] also had to partially or fully furlough more than 90 of their employees. The government is back up and running, but the nonprofit is still facing a ton of uncertainty about its funding.
Rekah Strong is the CEO of EOCF. Chantel Martin’s 5-year-old daughter attends the EOCF center in Yacolt that was briefly closed. They both join us now. It’s good to have both of you on Think Out Loud.
Chantel Martin: Hey, Dave. Thanks for having us.
Miller: Yeah, thanks for joining us. Rekah, first – you provide a number of different kinds of services associated with Head Start. Can you just give us a sense for the range of those services?
Rekah Strong: Yes, absolutely. So EOCF has been in Southwest Washington for close to 60 years now. We are the only Head Start provider in our community. There’s another partner that does some early Head Start as well, in our local community. We have 25 different locations. We serve Clark County, the southern tip of Cowlitz County, and then also Pacific County, which is located in Long Beach.
What’s amazing about our work is that we not only serve the babies or scholars in our program, but we are a multi-generational service model. So that means that we also walk lock in step with our parents and we serve the entire family unit. So as we’re figuring out educational and social emotional goals for our young scholars, we are also working with their parents to set lifetime goals as well.
Miller: My understanding is that some of your services are home-based. What does that look like?
Strong: Yes. So we have an amazing program for babies that are in utero until the age of 5, where we have an amazing group of individuals who actually go into homes. We serve 100 kids through this program. We go into homes and teach parents to be teachers. We use a curriculum that’s called PAT, Parents as Teachers. And what we know is that child brain development, most of it occurs, actually 90%, before the age of. So the sooner that we can start an educational engagement with children, the better they are off long term.
So our home-based program serves 100 kids where we actually go into the home and teach parents how to be teachers. Sometimes those kids are too young to enter our program or maybe they’re not quite ready for preschool, so we help to get them prepared. We also have center-based programs. Some of those are part day, which means they typically serve four hours a day, four times a week or maybe three times a week. And then we have full-day, full-year programs which serve families year round from 6:30 in the morning until 6:30 in the evening. And then we also have school-day programs which serve families for six hours a day. That’s typically when K-12 children would be in school.
Miller: What do you see as the long-term benefits of the services that you provide?
Strong: Well, Dave, what’s pretty remarkable about Head Start and the way that it was designed; one, our children in longitudinal studies have better outcomes when they reach the third grade. And that’s where we start to evaluate reading capability. And our children outpace their peers, or children that have had an early learning experience, outpace their peers on that initial benchmark.
We also get a lot of kids early and start screening for IEPs or 504s. Typically, in the K-12 system, a 504 plan may cost, on average, an additional $15,000 per year. Because we’re able to screen our children before they get through the K-12 system, we’re able to eliminate a bit of that cost. And we see that our children who may start on an IEP or 5 or 4, their duration of being on those plans are exponentially shorter, when compared to kids that didn’t have a dosing of early education.
And then finally, my favorite statistic is, it is not the children in our program who benefit the most. Longitudinal studies demonstrate that it is actually their children. And so the work that we’re doing here at EOCF isn’t just educating future scholars, we are breaking familial generational trauma, curses from addiction, to mental health, to instability or fleeing domestic violence, or just thinking about how you restructure your life so that the family unit is stabilized, so that the children in our program can have a fully engaged experience.
So [it’s] that stat about it’s our kids’ kids who do better. And we are preparing them, so that in 20 years or 25 years from now when they have children, they will be contributing to the safety net because they’ve received so much from the safety net that we’re offering families.
Miller: Chantel, can you tell us about your family? Who lives in your household?
Martin: Yeah, so I have my husband and I. And then I have a 16-year-old son, my 5-year-old daughter and a 1-year-old son.
Miller: I understand, as I mentioned, it’s your 5-year-old daughter who started going to Yacolt Head Start this fall. What has it been like for her?
Martin: She just started in the fall and in the beginning, she was a little bit nervous. She doesn’t have kids her age at home and my outside family don’t have kids her age, so she wasn’t really sure how to interact with other kids right away. But it really only took her two days and she was ready to go every morning and excited to be there. And it’s really helped her. I mean, she wasn’t very good at explaining how she was feeling and things like that, so that’s been a ton different for her.
Miller: Just in a couple of months you’ve noticed that change?
Martin: Yeah, it’s a crazy difference. The level of tantrums has gone from like 10 to 1. It’s crazy now that she knows how to express herself. And also, the teachers have helped me understand what she’s expressing through certain things. So it’s 1,000 times easier to de-escalate her being upset than it was before, just in that short time.
Miller: That’s interesting that that underlines what Rekah was just saying, that this is not just for young people, but for their parents as well. You have felt that.
Martin: Oh yeah. And I mean, I worked in childcare for nine years and I still struggled. It’s different with your own kids than it is when you’re helping other people’s kids. So, them being able to help me with that, I can’t be more grateful because I was lost at it. I already had my 16-year-old and I went through it with him, and I still had no idea how to help her with her emotions, even with all the schooling that I went through, as all the kids are different. So it’s those individual things that make a difference.
Miller: Rekah, can you explain the basic funding model for your nonprofit, where your money comes from and when it is supposed to come in?
Strong: Yes, absolutely. And before I do that, I wanna jump really quickly on something that Chantel just talked about and the short period of time of changed behavior in her baby. For us, experiencing this shutdown and having her classroom closed means that her baby isn’t getting the consistency and dosing of education and social emotional experiences. And I want to remind us that we, as adults, a week of closure or a day of closure may not seem like a lot, but when you are a birth to a 5-year-old or you are under 5, a week can feel like an eternity.
This shutdown has had an immense impact on us, our staff, our families, and more importantly, our children. When they come back to us – and we’re happy to say that we were able to open back up this week – there has been a loss of learning for her baby. And we’re having to go back and recalibrate that and get them back up to speed. So as adults, we may think, oh well, it’s just a week they’ve been closed or maybe a couple of weeks they’ve been closed. But for the children in our programs, that is compounded because they have no sense of long-term time.
So we’re thinking a lot about, as we bring our babies back: how are we supporting them and getting caught up. What I’ll say is, as of now, EOCF is a November 1 federal grantee. And we were impacted with the government shutdown because we were slated to get 60% of our funding on November 1 to be able to keep our Head Start programs operating and running.
Miller: Wait, more than half of your money for the year, you were supposed to get on November 1.
Strong: Yes, and we didn’t get any of it. So, right now …
Miller: In the days leading up to that, what kinds of conversations were you having as you looked at the savings, I guess you had as a nonprofit? What were those days like?
Strong: Oh, Dave, they were awful. Our team has been working many 16 hour days, seven days a week in contingency planning meeting, trying to think about how we try to keep some semblance of services running with our limited savings and reserves. And we’re still, right now, operating off of savings and reserves to keep the programs that we are able to run up and running.
But we had to furlough, I think you shared we had to furlough over 90 staff members, or partially furlough them. Last week, everybody got a letter on a Tuesday night – myself included – of potential furloughs. And then, our staff is so committed to serving our families that it was painful for us to go through with this scalpel, surgical-like intention to think about families that would get served, and really having to think about families that would not be served because we can’t afford to serve them without funding.
Unfortunately, Chantel is in one of the programs whose doors closed, but close to 300 children were impacted with the closure of service or reducing of services for them, because as of today, November 14, EOCF still has not received our federal funds through our Head Start contract.
Miller: Chantel, what went through your mind when you heard the news that your daughter’s program that has already meant a lot to her, as you were mentioning, was closing?
Martin: Well, my first thought was how I was going to plan for breakfast and lunch, because I have to budget all those things and usually she eats them at school. So now, I’ve got to figure out where that’s coming from. And then I was also worried about her losing connections with her newly-made friends and having to rebuild those relationships when they did come back. So I talked with her teacher. We got an email sent out. She printed it out for me, giving all my information so that she could still see her friends. And we were able to stay in contact with two or three other kids. And I feel like that it really helped her when she did go back because she wasn’t as nervous as I thought she was going to be.
I was worried she was going to have to start all over making those connections because, like Rekah said, a week is a really long time for them to be out of that routine. And then they took away the SNAP benefits as well. So then I really had to budget for meals. So that was the main concern.
Miller: What did you hear from other families who are in the same situation that you were?
Martin: I spoke with two other moms and mostly they were just stressed about food. There’s one mom that has multiple children in the classroom that we’re in and she was stressed out about how she was going to make up those meals as well, on such short notice. We ended up going to the Food Bank with her, because everything just kind of went south all at one time and she’s actually at the hospital having another baby right now. So, it all compounded and everyone was kind of freaking out. And we were, like I said, able to figure things out, but it was a lot to take in at one time.
Miller: Rekah, we’ve talked so far about the closures, but we haven’t yet mentioned one small bright spot for you – you got word, not long ago, that a donor that wishes to remain anonymous was giving you money that was going to be a kind of short-term game changer. Can you explain what this donation meant?
It seems like we’ve lost Rekah’s Zoom connection. So we’ll try to get that coming back. But Chantel, to you, what went through your mind when you heard that the program was going to reopen, partly because of this anonymous donor?
Martin: Oh, we were really excited. And when I told my daughter, she was jumping all around the room, so excited to see her friends. That program is her whole world. We do crafts and stuff at home, but they do so much stuff in those programs that I never would have even thought of doing, and it’s all so focused on things that they need to know to move forward and get ready for their school career. So by the time they’re in kindergarten, they’re going to be so ready and prepared that things won’t be a struggle. My oldest didn’t have that and he struggles really hard in school. So I’m just so thankful that we have this program for her and she’s not going to have to struggle the way they did.
Miller: Rekah, can you hear me now?
Strong: Yes, I can. Sorry about that.
Miller: No problem. Can you tell us about the anonymous donation that you got?
Strong: Yeah, well, I can’t say a lot about it because it is anonymous. But the only reason why EOCF is able to continue services and the reason why we were able to open back up our doors, starting this week and Wednesday – and it was amazing – we were able to, Monday, get approval from our Boards, have a meeting with all of our staff. Lots of tears and gratitude from this private anonymous donor, but they are replenishing our reserves so that we can continue to use our reserves to keep programs and get them back up and running. It was a private philanthropist that understood our plight, believed strongly in the benefits of early education, and were able to support us so that we are back up and running at 100%, which is huge for us, our staff and especially our families – as I think Chantel outlined here.
Miller: As you’re saying, this is a private donation that is anonymous, that allows you to replenish your own reserves. Then you can use your reserves to sort of limp along, it seems. But this is very different from the 60% of your funding that you were expecting to get from the federal government before November 1. Do you know where that stands right now, the real bulk of the money?
Strong: Yeah, Dave, I just want to share that it costs us roughly $800,000 a month to run Head Start programs. Our budget, from the Office of Head Start is close to $10 million – what we typically get to run programs for the year. And, we have no idea when those funds will be released. A lot of people are celebrating the government reopening, but there’s a backlog. There’s over 130 grantees across the nation that are November 1 grantees that still haven’t received their funds. We also have not received any assurances and our savings are limited. And the limited savings that we’re using to keep programs running, we have not been assured that we will be reimbursed for the dollars that we are spending to continue to serve families.
So there is still quite a bit of uncertainty and unknown. We’re also trying to figure out what the end of January date may mean for Head Start providers. We are concerned that we could find ourselves in a similar situation for grantees that are anticipating getting funding around that time.
Miller: Going back even to January and February of this year, of 2025, we heard from a number of folks who have depended on federal funding for years that the people in the federal government at various agencies, who they were used to dealing with, were no longer federal employees, had been laid off, fired or taken the fork-in-the-road email offer. Do you have people that you can even talk to in the federal government to get answers?
Strong: I think that’s what’s been so challenging for us – they’re all gone. They’re all furloughed. My understanding is that they should be coming back, hopefully in the next few days. But you have a major grantor, and nobody that you can ask questions about the timeliness or how things are moving. And we were just kind of in an information and vacu-void, and kind of still are.
We’re not quite sure when our specialists will be back to work and helping troubleshoot some of the questions that we have, but that’s the other piece of this that’s been so challenging. There’s been no one to ask questions to and this is a different sort of precedent. Before, there were guarantees that were given to grantees about if the government opens back up, you will be made whole. My understanding is this is completely different than any scenario that has happened previously. So grantees are operating to the best of their ability in an information void.
Miller: Chantel, before we say goodbye, how is your daughter doing today?
Martin: I actually got a video about an hour ago of her and she is ecstatic. She’s playing with her friends. She’s doing Play-Doh, building houses, just living her best life. It’s been a really good start of the coming back for her.
Miller: Chantel and Rekah, thanks very much for your time. I appreciate it.
Strong: Thank you so much, Dave.
Martin: Thank you.
Miller: Chantel Martin is a Head Start parent in Yacolt, Washington. Rekah Strong is a CEO of Educational Opportunities for Children and Families. They run more than two dozen Head Start programs in Southwest Washington.
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