During story time in Sue Walberg’s Head Start preschool classroom, four college volunteers sit criss-cross applesauce among their 3-and-4-year-old peers on the oval-shaped, royal blue rug.
Three little bodies squeeze together on the lap of junior Kathryn Wong, who gives a warning glance to a small friend who has begun to shout. Wong is a familiar face to the children at the Community Action Agency’s preschool. As the leader of Hillsdale College’s GOAL program for the CAA preschool, Wong and a handful of other college students look forward to several hours of tag, dress-up, and crafts every week.
The Head Start programs are federally funded and directed by the Administration for Children and Families within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“Established in 1965, Head Start promotes school readiness for children in low-income families by offering educational, nutritional, health, social, and other services,” the program’s website reads. “Since its inception, Head Start has served more than 32 million children, birth to age 5, and their families. In 2014, Head Start was funded to serve nearly one million children and pregnant women in centers, family homes, and in family child care homes in urban, suburban, and rural communities throughout the nation.”
Seventy percent of the 18 students in Walberg’s classroom come from low-income homes. Within Hillsdale County, there are eight more Head Start centers.
The Head Start program has been in Hillsdale since its initial installment as a summer school in 1965. The sterile-white rooms embellished by scribbled drawings of kitties and laminated reminders to use a tissue are new to students of the college. This is the first year that a GOAL program has existed for the CAA preschool.
“It all started during the Hillsdale mission trip two years ago,” Wong explained. “We just loved the kids. It was a huge success, and the teachers loved having us here. They were understaffed and really worn out.”
Head Start classrooms cap the student to teacher ratio at 10:1, so in a classroom of 18 children, Walberg always has a teacher’s assistant with her. Carola Thomas, the CAA’s Children’s Program Manager, appreciates the volunteers’ assistance to the teachers, and glowed when she spoke about their work with the preschoolers:
“I just love watching them with the children. They get down at the children’s level, they’re playing with them, but the children…they’re laughing, they’re happy, they look forward to it. It’s not just the adults in the room standing back watching, it’s the adults totally engaging with the children.”
And this is true.
When the volunteers step into the classroom, the children flock to them, ready to show off their latest tricks and toys. One student guides Wong to a corner, where they don sparkly masks and a feather boa to become the princesses of Hillsdale. Another attacks senior Spencer Doan, begging for what is surely the best piggyback ride in town. Sophomore Hannah Kwapisz bends quietly over an iPad and its master, who expertly bounces his fingers around the screen, giddy to win her approval.
“We try to show them a lot of love and affection,” said volunteer and sophomore Jessica Shuler.
She explained that the preschool students seem to function on a variety of levels: some of them chatter away, while others refuse to speak at all. She clarifies that her job is to show each child kindness and warmth.
On a separate occasion, Wong made the same remark: the volunteers make loving the preschoolers their chief purpose.
“One thing I just love doing with the kids that are less confident and more fearful is interacting with them individually and helping them know that they can do things, and they are accepted and love,” Wong said.
For Wong, this task is as easy as passing a ball back and forth with a timid child. As the satisfying thwack of the ball entering the child’s grasp echos in the gym, the child’s self-confidence expands. Wong, with her soft encouragements and warm smile, ensures the student that he can do this, that he’s doing great.
“In doing things like that, I really hope and pray that we give the students a little more security and identity, confidence in who they are,” Wong said. “Even if you don’t remember those things, these moments still form who you are, and so do the reverse. The bad things also form a part of who you are. I really don’t know the relationship of those things, if they can even counteract each other. I sometimes doubt that putting in that little bit of goodness will serve to counteract whatever badness is there. But that is my hope.”
