Lisa Desjardins:
Right.
“News Hour” has been in front on this. I have been doing three days of reporting with Ali Rogin as well to figure out what’s happening here. And I want to talk about two specific areas, one, Head Start programs around the country and also community health care centers.
Both of them are funded in large part through the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS. Here’s what we know. There have been funding problems in the last week and day. Head Start programs in 27 states have felt these sporadic funding freezes, many of them still feeling it. Those serve 20,000 kids and families, the affected programs.
Now, community health centers in at least nine states over the past few days have also been blocked from accessing and being able to get their funding. Now, Head Start programs, of course, are focused on early childhood learning and families. Some of them have already spent some of this money, and they needed to recoup it as part of the program.
In Washington state, Head Start programs have had these blocks. They call them rolling blackouts.
Joel Ryan, Washington State Association of Head Start: So this created an incredible amount of chaos and confusion across our community. It meant a lot of programs, even up until yesterday, were worried about paying their rent, paying their staff.
And, at the end of the day, what really impacts are the kids and the families. They’re the ones that are depending on childcare. And if their childcare is closed, that means they miss work.
