On September 24, 2026, the Providers’ Council submitted public comments on proposed changes to Head Start. The full comments are included below, and can be viewed using this link.
The Council is encouraging members to submit comments by the deadline of October 6. If you have any questions on the Council’s comments or on drafting your own, please reach out to Caroline O’Neill (coneill@providers.org).
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Re: Docket No. ACF–2026–0595; RIN 0970–AD30, Administration for Children and Families (ACF) Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, “Reducing Federal Burden for Head Start Programs.”
Dear Secretary Kennedy:
Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the proposal to rescind and replace the Head Start Program Performance Standards located at 45 CFR Parts 1301–1305 (Docket No. ACF–2026–0595; RIN 0970–AD30).
My name is Bill Yelenak, and I am president and CEO of the Providers’ Council, a trade association representing more than 220 community-based human services organizations across Massachusetts, including many of the Head Start providers in the state.
Head Start is part of the human services sector our members run across the Commonwealth.
More than 10,000 young children are served by Head Start in Massachusetts each year, supported by $20 million in state supplemental funding in FY ’27 alone, and our member organizations providing mental health, disability and homelessness services regularly refer to, and receive referrals from, Head Start programs as part of a shared continuum of care. While we support removing genuinely duplicative paperwork, we have serious concerns about how the proposed changes would affect children, families and the broader human services sector in Massachusetts.
A False Premise of Duplication
The proposal justifies this deregulation on the grounds that “the Performance Standards have grown increasingly detailed and prescriptive, often duplicating or elaborating upon requirements already established in the Head Start Act or other Federal statutes and regulations.” We disagree with that premise.
Rather than duplicating other authorities, the current Performance Standards provide the comprehensive, uniform guidance needed to enforce Head Start’s statutory goals consistently across programs nationwide. Just as importantly, many of the more than 1,400 regulatory provisions this rule would rescind, over 90 percent of the current Performance Standards, do not restate any federal or state statute at all. They are being eliminated outright, not streamlined, and describing that as a reduction in duplication misstates what this rule actually does.
The Act Does Not Permit This
The Head Start Act does not leave the scope of these standards to the Department’s discretion. Section 641A(a)(2)(C) directs the Secretary to ensure that any revision of the performance standards will not result in the elimination of – or any reduction in – the quality, scope or other types of health, educational, parental involvement, nutritional, social or other services required under the standards in effect. The Department’s own Regulatory Impact Analysis projects fewer teachers and staff, more children in each classroom, fewer hours of service and reduced spending on coaching, home visiting, health and mental health supports. We do not see how that analysis and that statutory obligation can both be true.
Program Quality and Child Safety Standards
We are concerned by proposed § 1301.05, which would rescind the federal staff-to-child ratio and group size requirements and defer to state licensing and, for license-exempt programs, Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) rules. Those standards generally allow more children per adult than Head Start does today, so the likely result is larger classes.
In Massachusetts, the changes would be modest. The preamble notes that Massachusetts and Vermont are the only two states whose licensing already exceeds the current federal standards. The federal floor is doing its work in the other 48 states.
The proposal would similarly shift oversight of background checks and transportation practices entirely to the states, removing the uniform federal floor that currently applies regardless of where a program operates. The proposal would also bar programs from requiring or incentivizing degree or credential requirements for teaching staff beyond the bare statutory minimum, while eliminating the coaching and training requirements built to support classroom quality. The proposal’s reduction of federal requirements governing curriculum implementation raises a related concern. Shifting these decisions away from standardized, research-based curricula developed with early childhood educators risks basing children’s instruction on individual programs’ preferences rather than the evidence-based practices trained teachers are positioned to deliver.
For a workforce already managing turnover and recruitment strain, Massachusetts human services vacancy rates for client-facing positions have run as high as 15 to 16 percent in recent surveys, far above the statewide job-openings rate of 3.3 percent. Removing the standards that support consistent, well-prepared staffing does not reduce burden so much as it shifts risk onto children and an already-stretched workforce.
The proposal also strips away nearly all mental health, health, and dental protections – not just monthly mental health consultation, but the screenings, checkups, and follow-up care that catch problems early – while repealing existing bans on corporal punishment, seclusion, humiliation, and shaming. Home visiting standards would disappear entirely, with no replacement, affecting more than 700 Massachusetts children.[1] Some of the lost protections for these children include visit frequency and duration, caseload limits, safety standards, curriculum, screenings and assessments, socialization, parent planning, and staff qualifications.
The proposal would also remove the center-based service duration standards, leaving only the statutory floor of three hours per day. Bus monitors and the bar on expelling children for behavior rooted in trauma or an undiagnosed disability would also be eliminated. These changes put children at risk of abuse and neglect and remove the tools Head Start programs need to keep children safe.
Equity and Access for Vulnerable Families
We object to the proposal’s new English-only instruction mandate, which would bar incentivizing bilingual educators, and to the removal of the requirement that at least one classroom staff member speak the language of a majority of the children in the class. Sixty-four percent of Head Start children in Massachusetts were dual language learners during the last program year. We are similarly troubled by the elimination of self-attestation for eligibility determinations, which the department’s own Regulatory Impact Analysis estimates would remove 8 percent of enrolled children nationally and disproportionately affects families experiencing homelessness (16 percent of Massachusetts Head Start children last program year) and children in foster care (225 in Massachusetts), whose set-aside slots and continued-enrollment protections the rule would also eliminate.
Current prohibitions on turning children away for a disability or chronic medical condition, and requirements to fully accommodate children with disabilities while awaiting an evaluation under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), would be rescinded as well. That is a significant loss for the 12 percent of Massachusetts Head Start preschoolers who had an Individualized Education Program (IEP) last year and the more than 1,000 children Massachusetts programs refer annually for evaluation.
What This Rule Does to Families in Shelter
We want to raise an impact we do not expect other commenters to describe because it sits between two systems that are usually discussed separately. At the Providers’ Council, we have a number of members who operate both Emergency Assistance Family Shelter programs as well as Head Start programs.
Families in Massachusetts face a six-month limit on their stay in the Emergency Assistance Family Shelter system. Getting to work and holding a job is what moves a family out of shelter before that clock runs out – and Head Start is often the only child care within reach of a parent in that position.
The proposal makes that harder in three ways. Eliminating the self-attestation asks families to produce birth certificates, income documentation and proof of residence at the moment they are least able to produce any of it. A family arriving at a shelter is not carrying a birth certificate. Removing the 3 percent set-aside and the provision that keeps a child enrolled when a family moves adds to the difficulty – because families in shelter move. And removing the service duration standards, leaving only the statutory floor of three hours per day, makes Head Start unusable as the child care a working parent actually needs.
What follows is a parent who cannot take the job, a family that does not exit shelter within six months, and a cost that lands on our state rather than disappearing. Our members that operate both EA Family Shelter and Head Start programs see both ends of this. We do not find it noted anywhere in the Regulatory Impact Analysis.
Parent and Family Leadership
We are concerned about the proposal’s rollback of parent leadership protections.
Removing the impasse procedure weakens a structure that has given parents a meaningful, statutorily grounded role in shaping the program their children attend. Removing a community’s direct input at the point where it shapes outcomes most removes accountability.
Administrative Cost Cap and Funding Stability
Finally, we object to the proposed reduction of the administrative cost cap from 15 to 5 percent of the total program cost. The Act sets that figure at 15 percent and gives the Secretary case-by-case authority to set a lower limit for a particular agency. It does not authorize replacing the number by rule for every grantee at once.
The department’s own analysis reports that 3.7 percent of programs operate below 5 percent today, which is difficult to square with the preamble’s statement that many programs already operate in this range. Because Head Start is a direct federal-to-local grant with no intermediary layer to absorb the loss, this cut would fall directly on the fiscal, IT, human resources, facilities, and transportation capacity that keeps programs accountable and running safely.
Community-based nonprofits already operate on thin margins, and provisions that strip away administrative capacity without a corresponding investment in direct services compound, rather than relieve, the pressure our sector is under.
Where We Do Not Object
We are not opposed to simplification. The physical activity requirement proposed at § 1301.04(c) is reasonable and reflects what most programs already do. We also support removing the standards of conduct language at current § 1302.90(c) that has been used to hold a program strictly liable for the conduct of a single employee – regardless of its training, supervision and policies. That provision needed to change.
In order to avoid duplication of services, we recommend children enrolled in Women, Infants & Children Nutrition Program (WIC) be counted as meeting the nutrition requirements because WIC provides all of the required services and many Head Start and Early Head Start children receive WIC.
In Closing
The proposal notes that programs must continue to comply with statutory mandates concerning eligibility, governance, school readiness goals, services for children with disabilities, fiscal controls, monitoring, background checks, civil rights protections, and parent involvement. But retaining these obligations in name does not preserve Head Start’s substance. Without the standards that give them practical effect, these bare statutory requirements would leave a hollowed version of the program, one still nominally in effect, but stripped of its capacity to support the children who need it most.
The Providers’ Council strongly opposes the provisions outlined above and the impact they would have on the children, families, and communities our members serve. HHS projects that these changes could free up to $2.2 billion annually by 2031 and allow programs to serve up to 236,000 more children, a figure the Massachusetts Head Start Association draws from the Regulatory Impact Analysis. But by HHS’s own account, those savings would come primarily from fewer staff, larger classrooms, shorter hours, and reduced coaching, home visiting, health, and mental health supports. Whatever the intent, the effect of these changes is to prevent Head Start from doing what it exists to do: “support children’s growth from birth to age 5 through services that support early learning and development, health, and family well-being.” They run against the body of research that produced these standards in the first place.
Expanding access by eliminating the standards that make that access safe and effective is not a tradeoff Massachusetts families, children, or our human services workforce should be asked to accept. We urge ACF to withdraw or substantially revise these provisions before finalizing this rule.
Thank you for considering this input.
Sincerely,
Bill Yelenak
President/CEO
Providers’ Council
[1] Massachusetts program figures in this letter are drawn from Program Information Report data compiled by the Massachusetts Head Start Association.
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