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Report: Head Start-College Partnerships Improve Success for Student Parents

Head Start services and on-campus childcare centers can help student parents earn their degrees and establish long-term economic security.

That’s the findings from a new report titled, “Head Start-College Partnerships as a Strategy for Promoting Family Economic Success: A Study of Benefits, Challenges, and Promising Programs,” released by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR).

The report explored the possible impact of on-campus or campus-affiliated Head Start programs for student parents and examined one-on-one, individualized support for parents to help them through challenges so they can successfully achieve educational completion.

“The model provides a lot of the support we know helps student parents succeed,” said Lindsey Reichlin Cruse, study director at IWPR, and one of the authors of the report. “We thought that if we were to profile these partnerships that do exist, we could provide some guidance for how Head Start can be seen as one mechanism for helping these student parents’ childcare needs while providing supports that can help them graduate.”

The report notes that research suggests that access to affordable, high-quality childcare increases parents’ ability to complete educational programs. Parents of young children report dropping out of college due to lack of childcare.

Greater collaboration between federally-funded Head Start and college campuses is a way to increase student success, but of 1,700 total agencies and organizations providing Head Start services, IWPR’s study identified only 82 partnerships between Head Start and colleges/universities. Of those, just 62 serve student parents and only 24 prioritize student parents for services.

“The Head Start model is uniquely set up to provide the supports we know can help student parents graduate,” said Reichlin Cruse. “This study is the first study to catalogue existing partnerships and describe what those models look like.”

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