By Sam L. Jenkins, Jr. State Senator, District 39, Caddo and Bossier Parishes
Last year, I wrote the School Employee Bill of Rights, which passed with overwhelming support. The bill protected teacher pay from being cut below what they made the year before. I wrote it because the people who choose to teach our children should not be the ones paying for it.
Head Start teachers are not covered by that law. Their rules are written in Washington rather than in Baton Rouge, and on August 7 the federal government proposed rewriting them.
The proposal would strike many of the critical components of Head Start that have been in place for decades. The requirement that a classroom of 4-year-olds hold no more than 20 children with two adults would give way to whatever the state happens to permit, and Louisiana permits one adult for every 15 children in groups of up to 30. Our own quality rating system calls that the bronze tier, which is the licensing floor, and awards its gold rating to classrooms of 20 children with two teachers, the same as what Head Start requires today. The requirement that Head Start teachers be paid on a scale comparable to public preschool teachers would be removed, along with the requirements for health coverage and paid leave. And the share of a grant that may be spent on administration would fall from 15 percent to 5, a threshold the government’s own analysis concedes only 3.7 percent of grantees currently meet.
The August proposal claims some $2.2 billion in annual savings and projects that those savings will purchase roughly 116,000 new preschool slots and 45,000 new Early Head Start slots by 2031.
No money comes with it, which means the $2.2 billion has to come out of the programs themselves. The government’s own accounting lists where: more children per adult, fewer days of operation required, lower credential requirements for most staff positions, and a cut in what a program may spend to run itself. None of it comes from finding waste. These savings are the cuts, counted a second time and presented as a benefit.
And the money only turns into new classrooms if Congress keeps the grant the same size, which nothing in this rule promises. The standards would come out permanently, in a final rule, and the funding would be decided later, by somebody else, in another building.
What I have learned from years of watching budgets is that programs under pressure do not shed costs evenly; they shed the children who are most expensive to serve, which in Louisiana means children experiencing homelessness, children receiving special education services, children in foster care, and the infants and toddlers we already fail to reach, given that fewer than one in 10 eligible children under three in this state has a seat.
Head Start serves 18,295 children across 315 sites in Louisiana and brings roughly $220 million a year into our economy. In Caddo Parish, the Community Action Agency operates 11 Head Start centers along with Early Head Start, and the people who staff them are educators, just like the teachers this legislature voted almost unanimously last year to protect.
Comments on the rule are open until October 6 at regulations.gov under docket ACF-2026-0595, and I will be filing mine. But comments settle the standards and Congress settles the money. Congress must also hear from us. What is worth telling them is simple: the standards and the money are interconnected, and settling one now and the other later is how a program gets smaller and loses quality without anyone voting for either. If you have taught in one of these classrooms or sent a child to one, say that too, because these decisions are real consequences for the people of Louisiana.