High scope

Head Start was started as part of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and Great Society. Born in the Mississippi Freedom Schools,[3] it was modeled on the Little School ofthe 400. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 had a single line authorizing the program,[5] and the Act gave broad powers to the Office of Economic Opportunity,[5] headed by SargentShriver, which began the program in 1965.[6] The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 also addressed preschool education.[7] In 1968, "Head Start begins funding aprogram that will eventually be called Sesame Street. It is a Carnegie Corporation Preschool Television Show".[8]
The Office of Economic Opportunity's Community Action Program launchedProject Head Start as an eight-week summer program in 1965. The project was designed to help end poverty by providing preschool children from low-income families with a programthat would meet emotional, social, health, nutritional, and psychological needs. The following year it was authorized by Congress as a fully-funded year-round program. In 1981, theHead Start Act was passed.[2]
Head Start was then transferred to the Office of Child Development in the Department of Welfare (later the Department of Health and Human Services) bythe Nixon Administration in 1969. Today it is a program within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in the HHS. In FY 1994, the Early Head Start program wasestablished to serve children from birth to three years of age in recognition of the mounting evidence that the earliest years matter a great deal to children's growth and development.Programs are administered locally by non-profit organizations and local education agencies such as school systems. Head Start is a program for children age 3 to 5 in the United States.