Areli Miguel’s three-year-old daughter, Angeline, was playing outside at the Santa Barbara Headstart center when she noticed the tears falling down her mom’s face.
"Your eyes are crying," said Angeline.
Areli was emotional as she considered the prospect that the facility may close due to a lack of funding.
"I go out to work knowing that they [her kids] are in really good hands," said Areli. "They [Headstart] build a very strong foundation for their future, and if all this goes away, there's like a lot of kids that live in apartments that don't have places to run and play."
When asked what made her cry, she answered that it's "the fear of just where this country is going right now, and it's like what their future is gonna be."
The Head Start Coronel Center is just one of many in the county that are under threat of closure due to the ongoing government shutdown.
"Our current grant period will end at the end of December," explained Patricia Keelean, CEO of CommUnify, which offers the Head Start program and other services to vulnerable populations in the county.
"Unfortunately, with the prolonged federal shutdown, our next contract has not been processed. At this point, we don't have any funding in place as of January 1. Services would end to 260 children and families throughout Santa Barbara County. Over 70% of our families are working families, many of them single parents, many of them working two jobs. To not have access to free childcare that's providing quality services that they can rely on every day so that they could go to work and bring home that paycheck, keep a roof over their heads, and food on the table, that's incredibly stressful. And it's going to put a lot of families in a crisis situation."
She continued, "If we do not have gap funding in place by January 1, we have already notified those staff, about half of our Head Start staff and children's services staff, that they will be laid off."
Dedicated staff like Martha Haro face the prospect of losing their jobs.
"I'm thinking about the children and where they're going to be. I'm also thinking about myself as a single parent, like, how am I going to pay my bills? And 97 employees received a two-month notice already, so I'm concerned about them," said Haro.
For Areli, the prospect of finding an alternative is putting her family under additional pressure.
"We have three kids, my husband currently has two jobs, and I have one. We're still barely making it," she said.
"It's the cost of living here in Santa Barbara — it's already so expensive — with also the immigration raids going on, it's also a concern about what would happen if he lost the income and I lost income as we're barely making ends meet," she said.
"It would devastate our household. We don't have 'luxury this and luxury that.' We're only just making ends meet. And it's always a fear of him...did you make it to work today? So it's...it's hard."
Communify officials hope that some centers can stay open. But as the government shutdown drags on, they worry young children won’t just be denied a head start, but a fair start.
