When Mykela Collins thinks back to when her daughter and son were younger, she doesn’t know what she would have done without Head Start preschool.As a single, working parent, Collins relied on the Little Hands Child Creative Center for child care funded by the federal program that bolsters learnin g and social skills for low-income children. Her kids loved it.”It opened up a lot of support for myself as a single mom, out working and trying to make sure my children were good and had what they needed,” says Collins, now an advocate for Head Start as she works toward a college degree in human development and family studies.At her kids’ preschool near 71st and Ashland, they walked her through all the paperwork and “made sure that I had any type of family services that I needed.” Her children are now thriving, a 17-year-old junior at Walter Payton College Preparatory High School, and an 8 year-old second grader at Manierre Elementary School.This week, President Donald Trump’s spending cuts eliminated hundreds of workers across the country who oversee Head Start preschool, support young runaways and teen parents and monitor health and safety at child care centers, including dozens of employees based in Chicago.The closure of offices in Chicago and four other cities leaves preschool operators and other organizations that get federal grants to support vulnerable children and their families without help.In Illinois alone, about 28,000 children in 102 counties learn at a preschool funded by about $478 million in Head Start grants. Head Start providers — often small, community-based preschools but also organizations that educate and support parents during pregnancy and infancy — say they haven’t been told what to expect next.“Programs are being left without any kind of support, programs for children,” says Celena Sarillo of Start Early, an early childhood education organization in Chicago that runs its own preschool and partners with community preschools. “This isn’t just about really dedicated federal workers that are being lopped off.”Start Early is owed a second installment of its Head Start money — six months of funding for 2,000 children — on April 30, Sarillo says. But accessing that money needs approval from Head Start staffers, historically folks in the Chicago office. And without it, she’ll face tenuous choices of what services — and potentially who — to cut. Related Chicago-area federal workers on edge as Trump guts agencies: ‘It’s devastating’ Three federal workers told the Sun-Times they were put on paid leave through June and ordered not to work or communicate with clients as part of massive cuts. It’s not clear how many employees were cut in Chicago as of Friday when federal officials admitted that 20% of staff were terminated in error.Spokespeople for Health and Human Services, the agency that administers Head Start and similar programs, didn’t respond to questions from the Sun-Times.“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” says Amy Blythe, who heads the early childhood education division at Easterseals Serving Chicagoland and Greater Rockford. “We have families that are facing uncertainty and anxiety. We have these businesses too, knowing what that would mean for them.”Head Start grants last five years, and Easterseals is in its final year, so it needs to reapply soon, Blythe says. About 1,400 children in the Chicago area count on the 35 preschool sites Easterseals operates directly or with community partners.A more immediate concern, however, is that providers need federal approval to make any changes to budgets or repairs to buildings, and that check comes from the regional office staff tasked with monitoring the complex $12 billion federal program founded to pull children out of poverty.“Everyone’s assigned a regional specialist,” Blythe says. “I met with ours at least once a month, every month a standing meeting. Any time I had questions or needed anything, she was available.”That included a violent incident outside an Easterseals facility last year, Blythe says: “The regional office was super supportive and found additional funding for us to apply to” to bulk up security.So far, there have been no problems reported with accessing funding, already appropriated by Congress. But if that changes, the impact will quickly trickle down, prompting layoffs and cuts or even closures to child care, according to Blythe.Along with Head Start, the office in downtown Chicago also offered grants and help for other vulnerable kids in Illinois and five other Midwestern states: child support, foster care and services for children without stable housing, cash support for families in crisis — plus child care. Mykela Collins says her daughter Tremyah, 17, pictured above, is thriving at Walter Payton College Preparatory High School and credits an early childhood program known as Head Start for part of her success.Pat Nabong/Sun-Times The Office of Childcare is “a $12 billion program that helps nearly 1 million families a month afford child care,” says Ruth Friedman, its leader until Trump took office. It also sets minimum health and safety standards for almost all child care programs in the country — things like safe sleep practices, correct first aid, and training and background checks for their employees. And it funds states to meet those standards, including annual inspections of child care programs.“Every single state will be affected” by the layoffs and consolidations of 10 regional offices nationwide into five, Friedman says. “There’s not enough staff left to properly administer this program and make sure we are doing all we can with these critical federal dollars…You can’t do more with less, you can’t do the same with less.“What that means is child care will become less safe, more expensive for families and harder to find,” she says.Employees designated as “probationary” were already sent packing in February across the federal government in earlier rounds of steep federal cuts.“Between the probationary staff who never returned and now this, the services we provide to states, tribes and territories will be severely cut,” says a Chicago-based employee who asked not to be named. “When you just take a hatchet to staffing without considering the impacts or having a plan in place to support, that’s where you’re rolling the dice with kids’ health and safety and that’s really scary.”Until this week, the Chicago office also provided funding for emergency youth shelters, transitional housing, maternity group homes for pregnant teens and street outreach, and then oversaw those programs, including visits and inspections.On Thursday, a top HHS official told Head Start grant recipients in an email that the office consolidations would save $1.8 billion a year and “would serve multiple goals without impacting critical services….We are here to ensure a seamless experience as we move forward together.”The employees placed on leave are represented by the National Treasury Employees Union, which last month joined a lawsuit against the Trump administration over cuts across the federal government. Cheryl Monroe, president of the chapter that represents the Chicago-based staffers, says they’re considering more legal action.Offices also closed in Boston, New York, San Francisco and Seattle.“They happen to be all blue states and Democratic governors,” says Lauri Morrison-Frichtl, head of the Illinois Head Start Association, noting that five that stayed open — in Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City and Philadelphia — are in states where Trump won.“If there’s going to be consolidation of offices across the country, it’s just going to slow the process down,” she says. “The hard part is there was no plan to put into operation. It’s not efficient, it’s the opposite of being efficient.” Related Questions loom as Trump’s sweeping DEI cuts hit federal agencies in Chicago ...read more read less