Recruiting Foster Children in Head Start

Any child that is in foster care is categorically eligible for Head Start, even if the family exceeds income limits. It is our role as Head Start staff to make sure that we are doing our best to meet the needs of the most vulnerable children in our communities. Along with homeless children and children with disabilities, foster children should be actively and consistently recruited for enrollment in Head Start programs. With a renewed focus on enforcing full enrollment across the board, it is more important than ever to make sure we’re serving as many children as we can.

According to a document released by the National Head Start Association in 2016, which is the latest data that we could find, about 150,000 children under age 5 were in foster care in the U.S. Of those, only about 18,000 were enrolled in Head Start. There’s obviously some room to improve.

According to instructional documents released by the ECKLC, the best way to go about increase foster child enrollment is to form community partnerships with your local child welfare agency. According to the Head Start Program Performance Standards [1302.53 (a)(2)(iii)], a program must “establish necessary collaborative relationships and partnerships with community organizations,” such as “Family preservation and support services and child protective services.” While the revised Performance Standards do not expressly dictate which community partnerships you need to form, allowing you flexibility to choose based on your community’s needs, if there any significant population of foster children in your community, then we highly recommend having a close working relationship with child welfare services.

Secondly, we encourage you to recruit foster parents into your policy council. Foster parents may support many different children in any given year, so they will have a unique perspective about what services that these children are lacking in your community.