Debbie Jones hit the post-vacation lottery of sorts, last week.
Jones, who directs Head Start and Early Head Start programs for Monongalia County Schools, returned from a summer getaway in Tennessee to learn her office had just received $1.6 million in federal funding to bolster the operation.
“We’ll definitely put it to good use,” Jones said of the outlay, which came from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Head Start and Early Head Start are family enrichment programs that have been fighting the fight for nearly 60 years now.
Both were born of President Lyndon Johnson’s federal War on Poverty initiatives in 1965.
In places such as West Virginia, with its prevalence of poverty and overall lack of educational attainment, those initiatives couldn’t be more critical.
Changing dynamics from the state’s crushing opioid epidemic add one more set of clouds, she told Monongalia County Board of Education members in February 2020, right before the pandemic hit.
Jones was talking then about grandparents tasked with caring for their grandchildren in the 21st century, as they attempted to navigate whole new sets of school bureaucracies and classroom politics and particulars – all of which had to seem utterly foreign to them.
“We’re looking at people who haven’t been in a school building in years,” she said at that meeting.
The new landscape, she told the BOE, is known as, “kinship care.”
Back in her office a week ago, the whole deal she said, is daunting.
Daunting, but also doable, she said.
“We’re proud of our connections with our families,” she said of her department and its staffers who fan out across the county, doing what they do.
That includes setting up medical appointments if they have to, she said.
And helping to line up secure lodging if they have to, she said.
On the occasion of her retirement in 2021, Joyce Walker Bennett, who for 25 years was a social worker with the Early Head Start division, even wrote a cookbook peppered with life lessons for the young moms she helped counsel along the way.
“I can’t stop caring, even though I’m quitting work,” Bennett said.
Bennett’s was a career made of steering moms through all the cognitive, social and emotional benchmarks to help their children succeed.
That she would do something extra at the end of her run, Jones said, is the hallmark of Head Start and Early Head Start in Monongalia County.
“We’re doing what we need to do,” the director said.
“For our families and our kids.”
Jones and her staff will spend the coming days breaking down the money for use in Mon’s system, come the first day of school this fall.
Efforts, acknowledged
Related, West Virginia’s school system statewide found itself in rarified air in the arena of early childhood care this spring.
In May, a study by the National Institute for Early Education Research ranked West Virginia sixth in the nation in pre-kindergarten education.
The District of Columbia topped the list, with Florida and Oklahoma rounding the top three.
Hawaii was last on the list, among the 45 states offering pre-kindergarten services at the time of the study.
The universal pre-kindergarten model that is the early education standard is foreign to West Virginia, Mon’s deputy superintendent of schools Donna Talerico said after the findings were released.
“I don’t want to say we’re an outlier, but that’s what we are.”
Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) the Farmington native and Senate Appropriations Committee member who announced the $1.6 million offering to Mon’s district, agreed with Jones, saying those dollars will go far.
“Every child in West Virginia deserves access to a quality education,” he said.
“No matter where they live in our great state.”
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