E.O.P.A. Toledo/Lucas County Head Start employees, past & present, celebrated their 60-year reunion on June 28, 2025, @ the Toledo/Lucas County Metropark: Middlegrounds in Toledo, Ohio. They had food trucks, a DJ, balloons, a huge board you could sign your name and put the number of years you worked at Head Start. In addition, they had alumnus Karen Longstreet, who gave a moving presentation on how Head Start, via her mother or her personally, has impacted her life. She spoke of her Head Start teacher, Ms. Sandra Hall, whom she said was careful, pragmatic, and allowed her to grow and be herself. She said Ms. Hall “ran her classroom with poise, dignity, and efficiency.” She said, she “was a change agent set to establish the fundamentals of education and life in children unknowingly needing her guidance.”
And this is what Head Start was and continues until today to be all about- it is a program that positively impacts the whole family. Head Start started in the basement of churches in the 1960s as a parent involvement and work/training federal demonstration grant. It got into the preschool business because, how else could this program educate, train, and get parents involved if it didn’t also care for their children and set an example through mentorship, socialization, education, numerous trainings, and national and state conferences. Head Start, today, can be found all over the U.S. They provide education to parents and children, social services, nutrition education and meals, medical and physical screenings, developmental assessments, parent involvement training and education, and home-based education to families with children less than 5 years old.
Karen Longstreet says her mother started at Toledo/Lucas County Head Start as a bus aide, then she was a family service worker, then an assistant teacher, to eventually a lead teacher of a classroom. She said in her presentation that this helped her “grow as a woman and parent due to what was now her work environment.” She said that during each transition, she would come to the Hamilton building as a grade schooler and watch her mother “become the next link to communal greatness.” Over time, she said, she would graduate from high school and eventually return to this same program [Head Start] as a college student and parent.
You are a product of your environment!…