MONTICELLO, NY — Head Start is returning to Sullivan County in early April.

But this date is subject to change.

That’s the latest word from U.S. Rep. Marc Molinaro (NY-19). He’s been following the progress of the federal agency, the local program of which closed abruptly on February 2, casting some 350 children and their families, plus 100 employees, into an uncertain future.

Molinaro’s spokesperson Dan Kranz said the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which administers the program, gave their office the early-April start date.

“Rep. Molinaro believes Sullivan Head Start should have never closed to begin with and these disruptions to families and staff are unacceptable,” said Kranz in an emailed message to the River Reporter. “Rep. Molinaro is continuing to convey the urgency of getting the interim Head Start program up and running as soon as humanly possible.”

Ryan Martin of the office of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) received a similar timeline. He said starting up a new federal program is a time-consuming process, but that the following steps have already been taken:

• Eighty-five percent of vacant staff positions have been filled, and all have cleared criminal background checks received from the state; and
• Nearly all of the facilities’ repairs and fire and safety inspections have been completed, and state licenses for operation will soon be issued.

Martin said the restart may seem slow, but that HHS is actually working very fast on a monumental project. He also gave credit to “state and county offices being incredibly responsive with executing staffing and facilities approval processes on a fast track, as well as the strong efforts of the Head Start interim grantee provider and the Office of Head Start.”

Dan Hust, director of communications in the office of county manager Josh Potosek, last week said that CDI (Community Development Institute) Head Start—the National Interim Management Program for the Office of Head Start—is making progress. “CDI continues to fill positions, on-board staff and complete the steps necessary to reopen in the near future,” he told the River Reporter last week. “Sullivan County is following their progress and looks forward to a quick return to normalcy for the children, families and employees of Head Start.”

Sullivan County steps up

It all began with a brief post announcing the closure on Sullivan County Head Start’s Facebook page. Parents and employees flooded the page—now defunct—with expressions of distress. “This is so ridiculous how do we find out 20 minutes before the kids get home off the bus that there is no more school through a Facebook post,” one parent wrote. “What about our children’s education and what about us parents as families and single families that provide for our children and have to work this is unacceptable.”

A few days after the closure, Bertha Williams, then the executive director of Sullivan County Head Start, told the River Reporter that the school was filled with county, state and federal officials trying to figure out how to get it back up and running.

At the time, Schumer gave county officials an early March date for Head Start’s return, according to a February report by county HHS commissioner John Liddle. Martin disputes this, and says only HHS can give such authoritative information.

NYS Asssemblywoman Aileen Gunther was among the officials at Sullivan Head Start in early February. Cody Vegliante, her legislative director, told the River Reporter last week there was nothing the state could do. Head Start is the federal government’s responsibility, he said.

The county agrees. “From a legal and technical standpoint, we could have let the federal government and Head Start’s leadership wallow through this mess,” Potosek wrote in his March/April newsletter. “Head Start is almost completely funded by the U.S. government, and the county has no authority over the local program.”

But the greatest movement can be found among the county employees who took on work not in their usual purview. Potosek said the county treated the closure “as a full-scale emergency, acting as we would in a natural disaster or major catastrophe.”

He said the Sullivan County Division of Health and Human Services (HHS) “tracked down every parent/guardian of every child and made sure they received the services to which they were eligible,” and that “our Child Care Council and its partner nonprofits found room for the children displaced by the closure,” and that “all of county government—and many of our partners—immediately stepped in to care for everyone impacted by this calamity.”

In the end, the county connected 70 children to speech and physical therapy service and 27 to child care financial assistance. As for the employees, the county “processed applications for 13 persons.”

‘Eligibility is much wider’

Hust passed along a report by HHS commissioner John Liddle and community resources commissioner Laura Quigley with more detail: “Seventy children were connected to alternate sites and/or providers to receive speech and physical therapy services. This is essentially 100 percent of the children who were receiving these services at the time of the shutdown, and tremendous work was done by the EI [early intervention] team to get those services realigned in the first week of the closure.

“Twenty-seven families have been connected to child care financial assistance—opportunities to obtain this assistance remain open for anyone eligible. Eligibility is much wider than most people realize—a family of four with a combined gross income of $99,250 is considered eligible for child care financial assistance.”

Liddle and Quigley said more information is available online at the NYS Office of Child and Family Services site.

They said the county’s Center for Workforce Development continues to help the rest with unemployment claims and dislocated worker services.

“We still aren’t exactly sure why this happened,” Potosek wrote in his newsletter, “but we were there for people when it did.”