By Julie Gaebe, Co-President
Into the 1960’s, childcare was viewed as “babysitting” for working mothers. Junior Leagues from across the country had quality care for children and lifting women from generational poverty as mission statements, and pilot projects in St. Louis, Missouri, Florida, and Massachusetts changed the paradigm of childcare by incorporating curriculum-based pre-kindergarten.
In St. Louis in 1964, the Junior League partnered with the YMCA and created Junior Kindergarten to build a solution for low-income children who were entering public school academically behind their peers. The program, staffed by volunteers, had a structured environment integrating early childhood education and literacy, socialization and classroom behavioral readiness, and healthcare and nutritional baselines.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson launched his “war on poverty” and tasked experts with designing a federal intervention program for preschool children. They looked for existing community-tested programs to prove that early childhood education had measurable success. The St. Louis Junior League’s Junior Kindergarten project provided data, curriculum framework, and structural templates. The federal government adopted its methodology as a direct blueprint for Project Head Start.
Once launched, the government turned to Junior League chapters across the country to implement Head Start immediately. Chapters secured federal matching grants to hire teachers, set up classrooms, and manage rollouts in their communities. Today, Head Start serves more than half a million low-income babies, toddlers and preschoolers nationwide.
The mission of the Junior League--to advance women’s leadership for meaningful community impact through volunteer action, collaboration and training--overlaps with the mission of the League of Women Voters. Begun nationally in 1901, the Junior League of St. Louis was established in 1914. A major partnership with Girls Inc. in 2023 overlaps with LWVUS’s national collaboration with Girls Inc. and our LWVSTL’s participation in the Girls Inc. national conference this summer at Washington University.
We are called to action to support our positions: caring for children is a shared societal responsibility and that the most effective social programs are those designed to reduce poverty.
Which brings us to news on August 3, 2026, that President Trump is planning to gut Head Start’s quality standards which are detailed in more than 100 pages of regulations for everything from child-to-teacher ratios, child health screenings, and family engagements. Exactly the data which proved the success of the program back in 1964. The plan is to replace those regulations with about a dozen pages of rules, leaving specifics up to state and local laws. The administration’s plan calls for more documentation from parents who are homeless or unemployed and one draft barred children of parents who are here illegally, even if their children are U.S. citizens. Project 2025 called for the program to be eliminated entirely, and its elimination was written in last year’s draft budget, saying, “The federal government should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations, and performance standards for any form of education.” After outcry, Secretary Robert Kennedy told Congress its funding was safe. However, government shutdowns and uncertainty have caused disruptions and a Biden-era rule that mandated raises and benefits for employees was erased. (The majority of Head Start teachers have bachelor’s degrees and earn less than $40,000 a year on average.)
Head Start centers may not be impacted for months, or at all, if these new rules do not take effect. Once the proposal is made public, federal law requires the administration to give at least a month for the public to weigh in. Once finalized, it may take months to implement. And there is a possibility of a lawsuit to halt its implementation.
Watch this space.
