Checking in with Head Start’s New Director

After two years without one, the Office of Head Start will soon have an appointed director: Yvette Sanchez Fuentes, executive director of the National Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Association, says she will take the post on October 13^th. She was appointed by Carmen Nazario, Assistant Secretary for Children and Families at HHS.

In a brief phone call with Early Ed Watch yesterday, Sanchez Fuentes described two areas that she will focus on from the outset: understanding the needs of training and technical assistance programs; and enhancing “transparency” among members of the early care and education community so that people “feel that information is flowing back and forth.”

Another goal, she said, is to “helping states to learn from the lessons of Head Start” as they try to build cohesive early learning systems as envisioned under the proposed Early Learning Challenge Grant program. “We can use Head Start,” she said. “A lot of programs already have infrastructure in place. The question is, how can you build off of what already exists?”

Sanchez Fuentes, 36, who has a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies from California Polytechnic University, started her career as a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified school district, teaching kindergarten and third grade. She later worked in San Luis Obispo’s Economic Opportunity Commission, creating a family child care initiative using federal grant money from Head Start’s program for migrant and seasonal workers. The initiative, she said, was designed to provide family care providers the training and guidance required to meet Head Start’s performance standards while providing migrant parents a more comfortable, familiar environment in which to place their children while working. The program, she said, grew from 15 providers in 1996 to 100 providers in 2001.

From 2001-2002, Sanchez Fuentes was part of the National Head Start Fellows program, an annual program that brings Head Start practitioners to Washington, D.C., to learn about the broader policy landscape and provide their expertise to policy makers at the federal level. Not long after, she took the executive director position at the Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Association, which is based in Washington, D.C.

She is the co-author of Migrant and Season Head Start and Child Care Partnerships: A Report from the Field, published by the Education Development Center in 2003.

Sanchez Fuentes said in the interview that she sees hopeful signs that the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education will be able to work together to build high-quality systems for young children. “It’s really about building capacity and building out a birth-to-8 continuum,” said Sanchez Fuentes. The need for these connections, she said, is hitting close to home: She has a son in the first grade.

The last appointed director for the Office of Head Start was Chanell Wilkins, who held the position from March 2006 to mid-2007. Since August of 2007, career employee Patricia Brown has been the acting director of the Office of Head Start.