ABSTRACT
When President Lyndon B. Johnson announced the beginnings of Project Head Start during a ceremony at the White House Rose Garden in 1965, Head Start was promoted as a family-focused preschool program that would provide social and educational activities to both children and their parents, with the promise of individual support and collective empowerment. While it began as a short-term, experimental, summer enrichment program for four- and five-year-olds, the program’s administrative placement in the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) was indicative of an even broader, more lofty mission: the eradication of poverty (Washington & Oyemade, 1987; Gillette, 1996).
