Bringing Head Start to College

By Mark Swartz, The 74

This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.

When Dayonera Rivera drops off her 4-year-old daughter Keilanys at the Holyoke-Chicopee-Springfield (HCS) Head Start center each morning, she doesn’t have to worry about traffic or rush back across town to make her classes. Instead, she walks a few hundred yards across the Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) campus, knowing that if she needs to check on her daughter, pick up materials from the library or meet with a professor during office hours, everything is within reach.

“I was ecstatic when I found out that they were literally right on campus,” said Rivera, a medical assistant working toward her nursing degree. It provided convenience, she said. “It just made it easier. … It made me come to school.”

Nearly one in five undergraduate college students in the U.S. are raising children while enrolled, and about half of these student parents attend community and technical colleges, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

A lack of access to affordable child care, college costs, and challenges related to balancing work, school and raising a family, contribute to the fact that students with children are nearly twice as likely to leave college before graduating than students who aren’t parents.

The Head Start center at STCC addresses this need. The center educates 25 babies and toddlers while their parents attend school, and while it’s open to all families in the community, leaders expect that it will primarily serve children of STCC students over time as more of them learn about it. The program is part of Kids on Campus, a five-year project launched in 2024 by the Association of Community College Trustees and the National Head Start Association. By increasing the number of Head Start child care programs on community college campuses, the project intends to remove child care barriers that too often derail student parents from achieving their educational goals.

The project represents a strategic convergence of two urgent needs: expanding access to quality early childhood education for low-income families and supporting student parents whose educational aspirations are often constrained by child care challenges.

The approach helps colleges gain capacity to support child care, which is a basic need for many students — and that boosts enrollment, persistence and completion. It offers families access to affordable high-quality, early learning opportunities for their children, and it gives future teachers at the colleges opportunities to get authentic classroom experience.

Kids on Campus aims to establish at least 50 Head Start programs on community college campuses by 2030. The initiative’s first annual report shows concrete progress: Three programs are fully launched, with two more opening this fall. Furthermore, 87 community colleges and 98 Head Start programs have engaged with Kids on Campus, leading to 18 potential matches between interested partners. The initiative has also launched Kids on Campus —Texas as its first state-focused effort.

While the impact report acknowledges that “big initiatives take time to grow and blossom,” results from the first year suggest the model is gaining traction. Perhaps nowhere is the promise more evident than in Springfield, Massachusetts, where HCS Head Start and STCC are providing student parents with exactly the kind of integrated support system the national initiative envisions.

Making It Work in Western Massachusetts

Like many Head Start programs, HCS Head Start faced acute staffing shortages in the post-COVID landscape. Nicole Blais, CEO of HCS Head Start, which  operates 11 sites across the greater Springfield area and serves about 650 children from birth to age 5, was searching for solutions when she connected with STCC president John Cook.

The partnership that emerged goes far beyond colocation. Students in STCC’s early childhood education program can complete observations and student teaching requirements on-site. Students in the college’s health services program practice screenings and clinical skills with Head Start children. The model creates what Blais calls a comprehensive approach to “rebuilding the early child care workforce” while providing essential services to families and the broader campus community.

For HCS Head Start teacher Heidi Fogg, the campus location transforms what student parents can realistically accomplish. She sees how the opportunity plays out in daily schedules: “Some of our moms who are students at STCC aren’t full-time students,” she said, explaining that some take evening classes because they’re raising a family and working. But for those who take classes during the day, she said, “they are able to bring the kids to our center, and then they can go, whether it’s to the library, to make copies, to speak with their professor or for office hours.”

“They just have that luxury of not having to drive across town, bring the child to day care to come back,” Fogg added.

The convenience of on-site child care can help student parents persist and improve graduation rates. The benefits of these programs also extend to the babies and toddlers who attend them. At home, Rivera watches her daughter enthusiastically share what she’s learning. “She likes to be the teacher. She likes to teach everybody at home what she learns,” Rivera said. “She says, ‘Okay dad, we’re going to learn about the spine of the book.’ So she literally pulled out one of her favorite books and started telling [her] dad, ‘This is the front, this is the spine. Repeat after me.’”

While it’s too early for comprehensive outcome data, the Springfield experience suggests the Kids on Campus model addresses several persistent challenges in higher education and early childhood development. By colocating services, the partnership reduces barriers for student parents while creating practical learning opportunities for future educators and health professionals.

For Rivera, the impact is clear: quality child care on campus means she can focus on her nursing program goals rather than logistics. “I don’t have to call the school if I have questions [and] wait for somebody to call me back. I can do it all in one go.”

As the Kids on Campus initiative works toward its goal of opening 50 campus-based Head Start programs, the Springfield model offers a template for how strategic partnerships can transform isolated challenges into integrated solutions. The promise lies not just in convenience, but in creating the conditions where student parents can succeed academically while their children receive quality early education.

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This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.

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