Bad news from school

We got some bad news from my four-year-old daughter's head start center earlier this week. I was summoned to the center and met privately with a representative of the organization, who informed me that my child is one of 10 who will be dismissed from the school next week for budget reasons.

This announcement stung me hard and I began asking question after question, but nothing really made sense. What I was able to gather from my conversation with the respresentative of the head start organization is that there is a budget shortfall and children who enrolled as three-year-olds back in August are being culled from the enrollment to make up for this shortage.

This is completely unfair and doesn't sound right. How do you ask a child to leave school in the middle of a term? Is this legal? What are they thinking? Head start is to benefit children and how are they to get any benefit if they are not there?

I couldn't help but muse that this should have been the last thing done to help make up for expenses. Most of the children who enroll in head start are considered low income or disabled and many of them would not receive the services they receive if they were not enrolled in head start.

Many of our parents are single parents, working parents, or both, and are not able to afford day care for their children. At head start they are in a loving, caring, learning environment where they receive two meals a day plus health, mental health, dental and other services along with classroom learning.

The entire head start organization is affected but students are being dropped from our center only. Our school seems to be a target because of the way the building is laid out. It can only accomodate a certain number of students because of that, and this number is lower than the number that the head start office wants us to enroll. This is very unfair to our school.

This is a bad idea all the way around. I am doing my part to publicize the dismissals but the decision has already been made. Her last day is next week.

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