Do you remember your preschool days? Holding your parents’ hands as the teacher warmly greets you inside; You start to recognize your name, where your seat is and which peers sit next to you, all in an environment made for you. You start to learn routine through letters and numbers, playing outside and being brave enough to ask someone to play with you. Although these experiences were different for all of us, you started the first steps in a world of education. It is a world of social understanding and the beginning of something bigger lying ahead of you. At the University of Oregon, there’s a program that caters to this educational system and people that believe in those values: Head Start of Lane County.

Head Start provides services for families and students in Eugene, including non-traditional students, helping low-income families with the proper care and attention they need. It helps non-traditional students with children by providing them with a place to work on their studies and that’s affordable as students while their kids also go to school. Head Start’s UO site works with graduate students studying early childhood education and provides services to both UO students with children and other community members. Head Start is a national federally funded program that has run in Lane County for over 50 years and has created a community.

Head Start offers different programs to help meet a growing need for social and emotional support for students — not just academic.

“It’s a lot different when you’re parenting a child with special needs,” Shanna Matti, the regional manager at the UO Head Start, said. “I needed resources as a parent.” Matti works with teachers and families at the site and went through Head Start herself as a mother.

Her daughter had a sensory process disorder, and she was able to find help through the Head Start program. She was also getting her Master’s while her daughter was enrolled in Head Start, earning her degree at the same time her daughter graduated from preschool. She now can work with students and families, helping them the same way she got help, she said.

“The expectation is that the Head Start program is doing the best they can to ensure that the child is ready to move on,” said Annie Soto, the executive director for Head Start of Lane County. She said through the years there have been more children that have social and emotional challenges. About 25% of students in Head Start have a disability, including learning disabilities, like reading, writing, speaking and reasoning as well as ADHD, autism and emotional disturbances.

“I believe that early childhood years are the most crucial years, because that’s in our brains, it’s malleable. It’s easy to retrain or introduce and teach young learners, social skills and life skills,” Matti said. She indicates that her experience was positive and helped her through her career as a mother and student.

Head Start’s classroom at the UO is located in the Berwick building on East 18th Avenue next to the UO music school. As you head past the Pioneer Cemetery down the hill, you’ll see a cubic pocket of a playground with slides and outdoor toys.

“We’re right next to the music hall, so from the playground, the kids can hear the music and they’re just enthralled by it,” EuGina Fails, the head teacher for the afternoon class at the UO Head Start, said. She works with kids from ages 3 to 5, helping them on a variety of levels.

“We have a couple of programs that we’ve adopted as our base curriculum, and Head Start likes to focus on building a foundation for the kids so that they can be as successful as possible in life,” Fails said.

One of the programs that Head Start implements is Second Step, a curriculum that teaches kids about their feelings and different ways to engage with them.

Head Start also has a curriculum called Creating Connections, which helps families connect with their kids at home, doing activities that encourage positive reinforcement, child cognition (helping with problem-solving, giving them the independence of having a choice and how to handle emotional awareness), along with communicating discipline, according to the Head Start program. They also work with the Department of Health Services, which assists families with building healthy and safe environments for their kids.

Second Step and Creating Connections go beyond preschool — they’re social and emotional means of teaching kids and parents that their feelings are valid and how to engage with each other. Communicating those feelings out loud helps kids address and express their emotions, Fails said, helping them connect on a social and emotional level with themselves and others before moving on to kindergarten.

Fails thinks that by exposing children to an open environment and speaking to them in earnest that they’ll be able to grow.

Additionally, Head Start uses public funds to support kids and their families with financial needs.

One method that Head Start applies is the Two-Generation (2Gen) approach. This approach works simultaneously with kids and parents, making sure both are stable educationally and financially. The idea is that a child can only strive if the family has stability and help on their end, Soto said. It’s an interconnected and interdependent way of working with the families at the school level but also at home.

“I act as a resource and support for our families at Head Start,” Allison McGillivray said. She’s a Family Support Coordinator at UO Head Start, helping families with resources and information here in Eugene. She’s been working with Head Start as an FSC for five years in the UO Head Start location along with two other locations in Eugene.

McGillivray said most of the families that go through Head Start are income-qualified and are living at or below the poverty line. She mentioned that although a lot of families are income-qualified at Head Start, it doesn’t paint the real picture of where the poverty line stands.

“There are families in Lane County that are living in poverty, but don’t income qualify,” McGillivray said. She described a grassroots study called ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed), done in Oregon about families that are above the federal poverty line but struggle to meet the basic costs of living. The study showed what the federal poverty line is for a family in Oregon, and the annual cost is $24,100. Families that sit above this level don’t qualify for services on the federal level.

McGillivray, along with Head Start, tries to help families on the state and federal levels of poverty making sure that their homes have everything they need to function.

This includes non-traditional students who are getting their degrees at the UO, such as those with children, who must be both academic and family responsibilities. Head Start at the UO helps integrate both dynamics with students that are going through obstacles.

Head Start launched its program in 1964 during the war on poverty. The idea was to help break the cycle of poverty in the education system and instead establish services accessible to low-income families.

Soto leads Head Start in Lane County and has been working with them since 1979. She’s responsible for making sure the agency meets the expectations and regulations of both the department of education in Salem and the head office for Head Start in Washington D.C.

Oregon first adopted the Head Start program back in 1989, because of senator Frank L. Roberts who brought the program to light. However, it wasn’t recognized by the state and on a federal level until Roberts and his wife, Barbara Roberts, the 34th Governor of Oregon, worked to adopt the Head Start program in Oregon. He wanted to change the preschool education system and thought that the Head Start philosophy was the way to go. Soto tries to keep the program going by showing the state why the program matters.

“Most of the research around early childhood in our country has been paid for by Head Start funds,” Soto said. One of the research projects that they were able to help fund during this time was the television program “Sesame Street.” Soto mentioned that a lot of early childhood research was funded by their program, calling it Head Start research dollars.

The program is mostly supported by local parents and teachers who have children in or work with the program. “One of the reasons it’s been around is that the people who receive the services make the decisions,” Soto said. Soto mentioned there’s a policy council in Head Start that meets monthly to talk about grants and funding for the program.

At the UO, Head Start has been around since the early ‘90s, reaching out and working with the College of Education and other divisions in the school. “We have a strong relationship with the early childhood division at the UO,” Soto said, saying that throughout the years they’ve worked with some great research projects and people, including Helen Neville, a brain scientist, working with the brain lab for over 10 years. They were able to take MRIs of some of the children and provided services for them and their families for a long time.

Annie Soto hopes that when children leave Head Start, parents have the resources and opportunities to go where they want in the community. She said as a parent you never stop advocating for your children. “It doesn’t matter if they’re 9, 12, 18, you never stop advocating for your kids,” Soto said. Having something like Head Start available for families will stick with you forever, Soto said, and will be a program that can help families for years to come.